(Perceptual Studies Student Lab at College . Enter CORSO in Burberry, cap and scarf)
CORSO
Sorry I’m late. I’ll make it up. Time’s our bitch, but that’s what we’re here for – get on top of it. I see you’ve met my teaching assistant, Mr. Quinn.
(IndicatesCHASE)
CHASE
I thought you fired me.
CORSO
But you’re so charming as my warm-up act. Who could resist you? Consider yourself re-hired.
ZANE
(Pointing at CHASE)
Ringer! Ringer!
CORSO
(Opens a door)
Welcome to Paradise. After you.
(Lights up on DREAM RESEARCH LAB ; six recliners arranged in a circle – lockers to either side– students study their environment. Glittering disco ball lowers from ceiling shedding fractals. Padded floor; students step gingerly. At center of recliners a black chalice on a tripod emits dry ice smoke)
CORSO
(Slams door aggressively)
Now you’re committed.
RAD
My folks always said I’d end up committed.
ZANE
And in a padded cell.
CORSO
God forbid you should fall down in your dream-throes and sue the institute that birthed your intellect.
CHASE
Where are the sensors?
CORSO
Everything’s wireless these days, poor Mr. Quinn! What are you worried about? Nobody would dare to censor you.
KOO
(Gestures at the disco ball)
Is that a camera?
CORSO
The Eye of History.
(Claps hands)
Chop, chop, little ones – Enough rubbernecking. Time’s a-wasting. Male locker room there, females that-away. Discard outerwear and belongings. Let’s get going.
(As CHASE passes him, CORSO says dryly)
The old razzle dazzle? REALLY?
(Banging of locker doors)
CHASE
We’ll see.
CORSO
We certainly will. Now, if you children would arrange yourselves male, female – thusly.
RAD
Like some antique dinner party?
CORSO
Sacred geometry. We need all the energy we can harness. We are immersing ourselves in the flip side of reality- the Unseen.
(JAZZandCHASEare side by side. CORSO distributes mugs)
CORSO
Tea time!
CHASE
What is this stuff?
CORSO
Sorry, Mr. Quinn, research is not a democracy. All that’s guaranteed is, you sleep on cue without allergic overdrive.
ZANE
I’m not allergic to Nurse Howk, either. Yowza!
RAD
(Shaking his hand as if from a burn)
I know, right?
CORSO
Drink up and settle down. I am collecting mugs so I will know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.
JAZZ
Yuck! This stuff tastes like bark.
(RADbarks like a dog)
CORSO
Shotgun it, Miss Suzino. Knock it back. Isn’t that the college way?
. (CORSOcollects mugs, turning them upside down to be sure they’re empty)
Musical selection? Classical or non-classical?
ZANE
Anything so long as it’s not classical.
CHASE
Anything – so long as it’s classical.
(They glare at each other. CORSO laughs)
CORSO
The bulls do clash! Ocean sounds it is!
(He conducts the music)
Everyone hold hands and close eyes please. Let the bonding begin!
CHASE
(Muttering)
Bondage, more like.
CORSO
Mr. Quinn! Must I gag you? That can be arranged!
(CHASE finally closes his eyes, rocking back and forth to get comfortable. Lights go down to twilight level on DREAM LAB. CORSO ascends on TOWER LIFT, wearing earphones and holding a conductor’s baton)
CORSO
Welcome to cosmic dreaming. You will dream at such a depth your mind will burst the bonds of selfhood and explode free and untrammeled into the universe. Free from the chains of time, from identity itself, we uncover the truth the quotidian obscures; we are one. Think on it. Think what it would means to be freed from debt, obligation, relationship, guilt, regret or loss. There are no mistakes. Without identity you are released from suffering. Everything you have ever wanted we can achieve together, effortlessly, and in abundance. Desires and longing are the fuel that rocket us to the stratosphere of rarest air. Once we merge in the great Oneness, we will dream uniquely and together.
(CORSOturns a page on his music stand)
Learning to harness our dream, we will control it, uniting our powers generously to become a potent force of reckoning. Prepare yourselves for the ultimate luxury – surrender – lost in the imaginative union that has always been your birthright. Time to claim and master your entitlement. In our relaxation mass consciousness will seize control…But you must be quick!The garden door is closing and you’ll be left behind… See, the stars are out. The world inside and the world without await your signal – longing to merge. Only the clatter in your head prevents the natural fruition of your indissoluble longing.
Doesn’t it feel good leaving the world behind? The universe itself is lost beneath you now. Now flesh itself melts away as invisible imperfections open themselves to perfection. Accept the freedom you are offered. When you open your eyes, you will be gazing down at the husk of your unwelcome, banished self.
(CORSO’Sspot is extinguished, spot rises onJAZZwho stands up eyes closed, feeling out in front of her like sleepwalker. She feels her way to the edge of the stage. No other students stir. CORSO’s voice orates as if from space.)
CORSO
Now the room itself vanishes, your earthly fears becoming someone else’s problem. Release those worries. Look how tiny they seem, as they disappear over the horizon.
(JAZZshakes head impatiently and crabwalks down the steps toward audience.
JAZZ
Where is this place? It smells like death. The end of everything.
A trial is a cutaway of its time and place, a look not just into mores and modalities but secrets and sewage. Two of the most interesting trials I have seen – and I watched every day – were Beth Carpenter’s trial in New London, CT and Michael Peterson’s in Raleigh, N.C. (both 2002, both for first degree murder.)
Each trial exposed the inner workings of a family (two families in the Carpenter case) and were so enormously influential for me that I wrote fiction about them.
Both trials revealed levels of shocking hypocrisy so deep we could have been in Victorian London; these accused would do anything to get what they wanted while maintaining social appearances.
At the time of his wife’s death Michael Peterson was gay sexting on hotmilitarystud.com; and although he insisted his wife knew about his affairs her daughter (who lived with them) did not think so. But the real shock in this case was that an identical death was exhumed from his past – another woman who died on bloody staircase. Both skulls revealed seven blows to the top of the head.
The first woman’s daughters – whom Peterson acquired along with her assets – thought she had died of an aneurysm. What would it feel like to see their mother’s real skull revealed in court for all the world to see? That was the genesis of Depraved Heart, though I changed everything else to create my own world.
In the Carpenter case, Beth came from a family of strivers who felt soiled and humiliated by their other daughter’s marriage to a part time stripper tow truck driver. Beth was accustomed to ordering her boyfriends around – two of them testified that she took over their cars and bank accounts as soon as they showed interest. Her boss, Hayman Clein, a successful Connecticut real estate attorney, fell for her attractions and became her virtual slave. When she asked him to find her a hit man, he offered up his coke dealer – and the three of them went down for the crime. That this simple ask keeping her own hands clean made Beth a murderer too is something she should have known – she also was a lawyer.
I used aspects of her overpowering character to create my Queen of Swords.
It’s a truism that real life needs to be toned down for fiction: no one would believe it.
VIRGINIA I should never have married you. Women see the worst of men, how cruel they are at home, how they believe in ranks and ceremonies, how they demand praise and management. We bring out what’s bad in each other. We should live separately.
LEONARD Virginia, I admit I have been a brute. I told you that before you married me. I have faults, vices and beastlinesses. I am lustful, a whorer, a gazer after women, a vicious man who has loved the refinements of vice. I have seen the filth of the brothel, know that it is filth and still I’ve lain with the ugliest whore. I have been selfish, jealous, and cruel. You are the most beautiful, most magical among women. Yet I must have you, and not some inferior female who would enrage me with her inferiority and submission. I am terminally and unconditionally in love with you. God, the happiness I’ve had being with you and talking to you – mind to mind and soul to soul. I don’t care so much for the physical part. You are the best thing I have ever had in my life. I will never be content, now, with second best.
VIRGINIA And here am I, a failure, childless, no writer and insane. You confessed your sins before we married, but I knew I was insane with a mad sister and a madder uncle and yet I married you.
LEONARD Tell me the truth. Why did you marry me, the penniless, trembling Jew?
VIRGINIA Perhaps only because you were my beloved brother Thoby’s best friend. He said, I’ve met a man so violent, so savage, he trembles with contempt for the whole human race. And that was you.
LEONARD Thoby was so beautiful it was difficult to speak with him of iniquity or despair.
VIRGINIA Thoby had the kind of beauty that defends itself from caress.
LEONARD And you’re the same. With such gestures one falls in love for a lifetime.
VIRGINIA Thoby and I were so close until he went away to that school, where the boys fought and buggered. When he came back he was so different, harsh and cruel. He beat me. I just stood there and let him pound me with his fists, feeling the most awful sadness; why hurt another person? He showed off by abusing me. I refused to surrender the space we used to have, but he said, Girls must give up. That’s what it means to be a girl. It was essential for the fellowship of men that I be kept out. Because you were his greatest friend I hoped the best of him lived on, in you. But you are nothing like him.
LEONARD The Goth was always a law unto himself. He didn’t acquire friends, he annexed worshippers. You and Vanessa looked so like him our Circle called you “Visigoths.” Misses Virginia and Vanessa Stephens, so beautiful that dogs turned to look at them in the street.
VIRGINIA Trust me, it’s not that pleasant having dogs turn to look at one in the street. So, you married me, thinking I was like Thoby and you were disappointed.
LEONARD Virginia, you must stop thinking everything is your fault. We were primed to fall in love because of our friendships, but we actually fell in love because we saw each other’s true selves.
VIRGINIA I saw how shocked you were when you realized you had married a madwoman.
LEONARD Life may be an obstacle race but that doesn’t mean one would want the obstacles removed.
VIRGINIA I should have told you!
LEONARD Did I tell you my tremor is hereditary? My father had it, too. Should I have confessed that? We didn’t want to talk about our families. We wanted to revel in each other’s hopes and dreams.
VIRGINIA When we talked, I forgot everything except the joy of our conversation. Originality and freedom, purity and restraint, we discussed it all. Here’s someone who cares, I thought, about the hidden pockets of emotion, someone who wants to work like a steam engine at uncovering the truth. I needed to know that when I weep, I am not the only weeper. You almost persuaded me we could change the world with just our two brains.
LEONARD Nothing’s more important than the two of us united.
VIRGINIA Yet somehow here I am, locked up in a madhouse.
LEONARD Virginia, this isn’t a madhouse and you are not insane. But we need the doctor’s permission for you to leave. We must figure out, the pair of us, how you can assume control. I don’t believe in guilt or apologies. I know what it is to be driven beyond endurance but I know I can avoid the whirlpools if you help me, Virginia. Let me help you learn how to assume control.
VIRGINIA What’s the use of men talking to women, we’re too different. We must hate and fear each other. Women can’t even step outside their doors with any safety. If you could strip off my skin you would see my nerves gone white with fear of you.
LEONARD You’re talking to the member of a despised race rooted out as pests wherever we settle. My nerves should be white with fear of your kind. It’s a fetid, sordid world. Yet we two are somehow different. In Ceylon, I took out my gun to put an end to the utter foulness, the stupid blind vindictive foulness of everything. You see, we have that in common.
VIRGINIA You did? You really tried to shoot yourself?
LEONARD I thought that the only reason one doesn’t commit suicide is that one is either a selfish coward or already dead and rotten. The one thing that saved me was a vision of you, the beautiful Miss Stephen who wrote like an angel and quoted Plato. I longed to meet you. But I was so afraid of making a fool of myself my very soul and stomach trembled.
VIRGINIA You stayed alive because of me?
LEONARD I did. So you must return the favor. Lytton Strachey and I wrote long letters back and forth. He argued against suicide and insisted that I propose.
VIRGINIA Lytton asked me to marry him once. Thank God, I didn’t. The very idea of his criticisms would have kept me from writing anything.
LEONARD He understood all that. He said the only person who was right for you was me.
VIRGINIA But he didn’t know about my spoiled, ruined body.
LEONARD You have a perfect body!
VIRGINIA Currently being stuffed like a Strasbourg goose, thanks to you. Strapped down, force fed, shot with drugs.
LEONARD All because you refuse to eat. Let me order dinner right now and feed it to you. How about that?
VIRGINIA I’m not hungry. Oh, let me die, Leonard! Let me go! Find a girl who can love you properly! I failed in the bedroom – you made that perfectly clear.
LEONARD Perhaps copulation is inherently degrading. Really, horseback riding is more pleasurable.
VIRGINIA But there’s children to look forward to, surely.
LEONARD I don’t want children and if you really read The Wise Virgins, you’ll know why.
VIRGINIA But we won’t raise them in a strict Jewish home!
LEONARD There’s your prejudice again! It wasn’t the Judaism, it was the endless striving for dominance of tiny minds. How I hated it!
VIRGINIA Father shrieked and screamed that we were sending him to the poorhouse with our expensive household bills. I brought him a catalog of King’s College classes for Ladies but he said he couldn’t spare me because it was my turn to pet him, soothe him, cut his meat! I wanted to write, but I couldn’t keep it private. Once I had a diary with a lock but Thoby stole it, so I pasted my secret pages into a book.
LEONARD After my father died we really were headed for the poorhouse. My brother had to work to support the family.
VIRGINIA Don’t you think every family is a lonely caravan, absolutely private, silent and unknown? I see us wedged in together, surrounded by vast space we couldn’t cross. It seemed impossible to break through the dark cloud and shed light on those shrouded, curtained rooms. Censors, visionary figures everywhere admonished us. Father told me no intelligent being had any right to believe in God, but when I was six years old, I dreamed that I was God.
LEONARD And your mother?
VIRGINIA Mother said there couldn’t be a God because no just God would have killed the splendid Herbert Duckworth, her first husband. She loved him so. She never told my father she loved him.
LEONARD
Never?
VIRGINIA
Never. I wrote stories in which clever, courageous children rescue their families and bring hope to the sick. Do you believe in God, Leonard?
LEONARD No one believes in God. Virginia, we must refuse to be determined by our pasts. Our parents had too many children to cope but we won’t make the same mistake. Don’t you want to be free, Virginia? With so many mouths to feed, freedom’s never possible.
VIRGINIA I know you’re only saying that because Dr. Hyslop insists the mad should never propagate.
LEONARD I swear I’m not. Nessa has children – and with all her lovers looks to spew many more – wouldn’t that be enough for you?
VIRGINIA (turning away)
Surely loneliness destroys us. Futile and infertile – aren’t those more than adequate reasons for self-murder?
LEONARD We’ll never be futile, not us. You’ve written a wonderful novel, Virginia. I know you’ll write many more.
VIRGINIA Received by my family in complete silence.
LEONARD They’re barely literate. My whole point is that family shouldn’t matter. I’ve freed myself – I never see my mother if I can help it. Remember how upset she was to be excluded from our wedding? Surely an ambitious person’s gaze should widen, take in more?
VIRGINIA Take in who? Society, like the Countess of Carnarvon? Publishers like Gerald?
LEONARD How about other modern thinkers, trying to do what we are doing? Finding new ways to be, see, think, do, connect. Roger Fry with his “significant form”. Maynard Keynes with aggregate demand, E. M. Forster’s clever novels. The literary impressionism you attempted in Voyage Out.
VIRGINIA Forster isn’t clever. He thinks women should be banned from the London Library Board and never allowed on the grass at Cambridge. How on earth can dry, dusty books ever make up for real, live children?
LEONARD Was your childhood really anything you’d care to revisit, Virginia?
VIRGINIA Yes, yes, yes. If I could only tell you, or anybody. Oh, the magic summers at St. Ives! Lost, gone forever. Paradise before, catastrophe after. Now whatever it is I want I cannot tell. I was born with extraordinary capacities for feeling, but you say bury my emotions or they will never let me out.
LEONARD Not bury them, Virginia. Manage them. We need to convince the world that you are fine and well. Let’s get to the bottom of the ideas that torment you. How many years was that paradise of childhood, really? Two or three? We have our whole, long, fruitful lives ahead of us.
VIRGINIA It was paradise before the deaths began.
LEONARD There’s no escaping death, Virginia.
VIRGINIA You intimate that children would drive me mad?
LEONARD They would certainly stop you working. Can you see a house filled with nannies, nurses, servants, their followers and lovers? Cockney quarrels and endless Bedlam difficulties? You once described your nursery as a cage where you were forced to perform compulsory tricks.
VIRGINIA And what do you call this damnable house? Cousin Madge says you’re mean and think of nothing but money.
LEONARD Madge is an idiot. Let’s resolve to cut all idiots on principles of health.
VIRGINIA If that were only possible! Here I am in George’s house, sentenced to eternally hawking Gerald’s books!
LEONARD But George isn’t here. And there are other publishers in the world besides Gerald.
VIRGINIA Worse ones, doubtless. Did you read Gissing, or even Meredith?
LEONARD Then we’ll publish our books ourselves.
VIRGINIA (turning to face him)
Could such a thing be possible?
LEONARD Of course, it is. You know your Women’s Cooperative promotes apprenticeships. I think the Working Man’s College teaches printing.
VIRGINIA Oh, imagine if that were so! How I’d love to print! I used to bind books, I liked that. The tools were so beautiful. Papers from Italy, leathers from Africa. The smell alone was heavenly.
LEONARD Don’t these doctors recommend handiwork?
VIRGINIA Tat-work! Or crochet!
LEONARD Let’s defeat them, then. Can’t we, together, push the world our way? Or at the very least carve out a tiny corner where we can live and thrive?
(Scene 4. The conservatory. VIRGINIA sits unmoving before a tea-table. Enter LEONARD.)
LEONARD I see I am in time for tea. May I join you?
VIRGINIA I can’t stop you.
LEONARD
(daringly pulls his chair to the table)
How are you feeling?
VIRGINIA Like a helpless baby on the shore of life, turning over pebbles. The ocean tosses me pebbles and I turn them over, one by one. I’m naked, a child, and no one helps me.
LEONARD I want to help you. May I pour? Lovely cakes.
(he pours two cups, carefully serves her a cake, takes one himself, munches and sips)
Delicious. Sir George keeps an excellent cook.
VIRGINIA His brain is in his stomach. Or rather, he has a stomach instead of a brain but no one’s noticed. I’m afraid the tea is cold. They won’t let me have a spirit lamp in case I set the place on fire, like mad Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre.
LEONARD The tea is perfect. Oolong, I notice. May I sugar yours?
VIRGINIA You’re certainly sugaring everything else. Why are you in such a good mood?
LEONARD I’m happy to see you looking so well. What have you been thinking?
VIRGINIA That I want to write a novel about silence. Depression interests me. One could make a game of assembling the fractured pieces, capturing the things people don’t say. How deeply they drive themselves into me, those things people daren’t say aloud! It seems everyone is in agreement that the truth of women must be suppressed. Repress, control. If I am going to write all this I will need a different word than novel or people won’t know what to expect. Elegy, perhaps?
LEONARD You were born to write, Virginia. Your book is beautiful. I mean The Voyage Out.
VIRGINIA My book? My poor sad, dull novel which shall certainly be abused? A whole made painfully from shivering fragments. “The spring, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid on fields entirely careless of beholders.” I tried to speak truth but I collapsed under the burden of my failure.
LEONARD You can’t think how I envy you your spring of fantastic imagination. It’s beautifully written. But it’s so very sad. Tell me, why must Rachel die before the wedding?
VIRGINIA Because the fiancé is based on Clive and who would ever want to marry him?
LEONARD Nessa did.
VIRGINIA He kept his real face very well hidden. The things he says about me to others! Adrian showed me the letters!
LEONARD He’s angry because you refused him. Clive’s a monster. We’re in complete agreement. What if we eliminated monsters from your life? What would you write next?
VIRGINIA It’s not possible to eliminate monsters. Look at this new war they’re brewing. War is a stupid, violent, hateful, idiotic, trifling, mean, ignoble display. Why should I dare to love you when you will only fight and die, trodden underfoot in some soggy foreign field?
LEONARD
You won’t get rid of me that easily. Dr. Craig has given me a dispensation because of my tremor.
VIRGINIA
So you’ve seen Dr. Craig. Is he as stupid as the others?
LEONARD
He thinks we need to design a healthy life. I think so too. And because your healthy life is writing, I want to hear about what you’ll write next.
VIRGINIA (dreamily)
I want to write about the islands of light swimming through the grass. I want to show the peace, the unity in the smallest flower – but whenever I try the great ugly beast on the beach stamps and snorts.
LEONARD What beast?
VIRGINIA He is chained, but he pulls at his chain. I’m so afraid – he might escape.
LEONARD Is this a memory, Virginia?
VIRGINIA What have we but memory? Women are the beggars of every family; memory is our only treasure, the only dowry we inherit. Tell the truth, said father. But mother said sometimes a lie is better than the truth, because of feelings. You must spare people’s feelings, but only if they have the right feelings. What if their feelings are false to begin with? My feelings were never the right ones. Father was my writing teacher, did I tell you that?
LEONARD And what was his recipe?
VIRGINIA He said only write the truth and say exactly what you mean.
LEONARD If only that were possible! You saw how I botched my turn.
VIRGINIA But the truth is that when father died, I hated him. I was so relieved to be free of the exacting tyrant, the histrionic, self-pitying, violent, deaf, alternately loved and hated father. We all were. We fled that house, from a crypt slimy with fungus, disgusting with mold, gushing a sour stench of decay.
(A catch in her voice)
How we rejoiced! But in truth we had graduated from a life of suppressed rage into one of perpetual mourning. In my fantasies, Father confesses and repents his crimes, asking my forgiveness. But he could never do that, really. Everyone saw him as the pinnacle of reason and privilege, yet he felt ill-used by everyone he knew, even by life itself. I wonder, was he haunted by a devil, by some demon? Was it not he, himself, but something sitting on his shoulder that pecked at us so fiercely?
LEONARD Naturally he grieved when your mother died. He must have altered greatly then.
VIRGINIA My mother’s death was the greatest disaster that could possibly have happened. Father sat through countless meals groaning aloud about how he wished to die. Do you know, it is my worst fear that I will become like him. It is a fate more to be feared than madness, to my mind. He is inexplicable. Extraordinarily gifted, godlike, yet somehow childlike. There was an infantile fixation! Bubbling up from some dark place, I suppose, below the level of conscious thought. But he was protected by society, as we were not. In the privacy of our home he seemed unbound by any of the laws of ordinary people. Yet he desired constant pity! We were the ones forced to be self-controlled and coolly analytical, plotting ways to get around him. But when he shouted at Nessa I hated him so much I could have killed him myself. Our punishment came when Thoby died. Violet and Vanessa also were stricken with typhoid but only the sheltered males perished.
LEONARD Thoby’s death wasn’t punishment. Thoby died of a typhoid germ. If these men are fragile as you say, how could your father be the brute you dreamed of, stamping on the beach?
VIRGINIA All you men are brutes, with your gaming, your competitions, your subjugation and your wars. Men use knives, to cut things, to sacrifice, while women use needle and thread, to sew them up. But nothing’s as good once it’s been repaired. When my father threw a fish into the bottom of the boat, I felt I suddenly was that fish, flopping, gasping, drowning in the very air all had sworn was safe to breathe. I had more in common with waves and seabirds than with that man.
LEONARD Now Virginia, you mustn’t get excited.
VIRGINIA The great secret is not to feel. Strong feelings create an abyss between oneself and others. No one ever says anything they really mean. I am bored by men and their silly violence and wars. I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by heroism, virtue and honor. Men’s acquisitive instincts cause them to desire other people’s fields and goods, to make frontiers and flags, battleships and poison gas, to offer up their own lives and their children’s lives. Why should I submit to them, why endure a lifetime of unpaid service to their shoddy interests?
LEONARD I agree we are a disgusting species. But man’s only locomotion is logic and reason. We must never give up.
(Scene 2. The Conservatory at Dalingridge Hall. VIRGINIA sits slackly in an old-fashioned wheeled chair, gazing into nothingness.)
LEONARD How are you today, Virginia? Sleep well?
VIRGINIA
(galvanizing)
How can there be sleep for those of us who see the flesh melted off the world? Have you come to gloat over the shattered splintered fragments of my body? You care nothing for what they do to me! You macerate my soul. With sleep comes horrible dreams. I was trapped in a drainpipe with the savage hairy man who squats, gobbling and belching, dabbling at my entrails. Soon I will be shrouded in snail slime sticky from the hollow stalk. Get away from me! I don’t want to see you!
LEONARD
(humbly)
I’ve brought chocolate creams. You used to love those.
VIRGINIA You are a shadow. You torment me with shadows of the people I might have been, all my unborn selves. Go away, Leonard. Your cause is hopeless.
LEONARD No cause is hopeless as long as we can talk.
VIRGINIA I have nothing to say to you. Your kind disgusts me.
LEONARD You can’t realize how utterly you would end my life too if you died or ever dismissed me. Aren’t I still your precious Mongoose? Aren’t you my beloved Mandrill?
VIRGINIA Any real relationship between men and women is unattainable. It’s all nonsense and lies.
LEONARD Weren’t we going to create our own special relationship? A real marriage, unlike everyone else’s, a vital, living thing. That’s what we promised.
VIRGINIA And then you brought me to George’s house, you traitor.
LEONARD Officialdom requires certification following suicide attempts! You’d be a ward in chancery! This is the only way!
(He seems about to sit down, she stops him)
VIRGINIA If you sit I’ll start screaming and I won’t stop.
LEONARD I’m so afraid of the future, Virginia, if you can’t get strong.
VIRGINIA You want me to tolerate filthy fingers stuck down my throat! That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it?
LEONARD Is eating chocolate creams so terrible?
(He offers the box)
VIRGINIA Don’t come near me.
(He sets the box on the little table, kneels)
LEONARD I would grovel to you and kiss your toes if you would only listen to me, Virginia. Aren’t you better now? Aren’t you getting stronger? Look, you’re free and out of your straps. You’re sleeping some and eating a little. Have the hallucinations gone away?
VIRGINIA I’m terrified of sleep. I’m terrified of chloral and the nightmares it provides. When I wake at night and understand all the terror, violence and unreason still presiding over the universe it is worse than death. I am nothing. I am nobody. I am I-less.
LEONARD Didn’t you always say that only writing that brings order to madness? You called art humanity’s one defense.
VIRGINIA Art is a conspiracy among the civilized. Yet how can we call people civilized who insist on enslaving half their populace? Behold myself, empty-handed and force-fed, by your order. I know I have a good mind, but you have surrendered me to the very people bent on destroying it.
LEONARD Civilization is largely humbug, Virginia. That may be the only thing I’ve learned. I always felt I’m playing a part upon a stage. You’re the only honest person I’ve ever met and now you’re at risk. I just want you to get well, Virginia, so we can plan our hundred books.
VIRGINIA You care nothing for my plans! Shall I ever write again one of those sentences that gives me the most intense pleasure? For years now, people jerked wires to make me jump like a jack in the box when all I want is peace. I long to be ten miles beneath the sea. Here I am stuck in polar ice, harassed by barbarians.
LEONARD Your ice drifts toward home.
VIRGINIA
I have no home.
LEONARD
You will get well and our life will become possible again. As soon as you gain weight and master some calm and some cheer, we are free!
VIRGINIA Calm and cheer in a world like this one! Don’t treat me like some retarded infant. When we walked together at Asheham you inveighed against the world as a stupid, corrupt brothel.
LEONARD And I still believe that. I wanted to go into politics but politics is brutal and discouraging. Now I think I must change the world through workers’ cooperatives. We must stand up against all the evils that we see.
VIRGINIA You said writers are born to be unhappy.
LEONARD I fear to some extent that must be true. It’s harder on you, because you’re a sensitive, poetic writer. But if we swear to support each other –
VIRGINIA My punishment is unending. Mother didn’t approve of school for girls. Boys should go everywhere and know everything, and girls should stay home and know nothing. All my brothers were sent to school, where I must say they did horribly. George and Gerald were incurably stupid and Thoby jumped out a window rather than write his prep. But I learned Greek! I learned Latin! I read every book in Father’s library, all on my own! And here I am, sentenced to Bedlam for it.
LEONARD When you have seen the squalor that I have, you will realize that Dalingridge Hall is no punishment, Virginia.
VIRGINIA It’s a punishment for me. Think of its owners, in their smug pride, rulers of the universe. How can you of all people, abide them? But they seduce even you with their privilege, luxury and glamor. What is the use of the finest education in the world if it teaches people not to hate force but to use it? Why can’t we learn the arts of understanding people’s lives and minds? All that the professions preach is worship of the sacred tree of property.
LEONARD The doctors say you pushed yourself too hard.
VIRGINIA Is that what you really think, that diving deep is dangerous? Go away, Leonard. I can’t bear to hear you lie to me.
Following her honeymoon Virginia Woolf attempted suicide and was sent to recover at her half-brother’s estate, Dalingridge Hall.
CHARACTERS
Virginia Woolf: a sensitive young artist having a breakdown
Leonard Woolf: her new husband, nervous, forceful, an “outsider”
Dr. Craig: bluff, elderly, genial, doctor to the wealthy
Dr. Hyslop: a fashionable eugenicist
Two orderlies: rough & tumble Cockneys ALF & BOB (orderlies & doctors played by the same actors)
(Scene 1: Dalingridge Hall, An ostentatious faux British castle with all the updated luxurious mod-cons. A pair of white-coated orderlies maneuver a stretcher into a sickroom.)
ALF Hold up a mo, let’s have a fag.
BOB Buckle her in, and then we’ll have a fag.
ALF Now that’s right stupid, that is. Tie her up, the job is done. No time for a fag then.
BOB Oh, right. I get you. Where can we stow her? She’s heavy.
ALF Tall as a man and strong like one, so they say. Prop her up over here. Careful, now, you got me shin!
(They lean the stretcher against the wall facing the audience. Fumble with cigarette packs. ALF sits on the bed.)
BOB I don’t like her looking at us.
ALF Oh, she’s well out of it. Off to dreamland. Took the mickey out of her, they did.
BOB So what’s up with this one? Trying on hats and ordering jewelry too much for her?
ALF I heard it was her honeymoon what sank her!
BOB Oh, Lord!
(they both guffaw)
BOB Wonder it doesn’t happen routine-like, what with the shock and all. I mean, she’s not used to seeing the farm animals getting frisky in the spring. She’s not walking to church with the village lads. She’s not sharing a bed with the brothers and sisters. So everything seems right and proper until the big night and then –
ALF All hell breaks loose!
(they laugh uproariously)
BOB So, you seen the husband?
ALF Oh yes, he was hanging about. Wringing his hands.
BOB So what’s he look like, then? One of them muscle-bound rowing blues?
ALF No, no, no. Nervy bloke. Just back from the East where he’d been sorting out the blacks.
BOB Oh, Lord! Used to carrying a big stick is he?
(they gasp, cough, laugh and fall about)
VIRGINIA
(groggily)
What is this place? What vast forces of good and evil dropped me here? I burn, I shiver. I turn, I tumble, I am stretched. I am nailed like a stoat to the stable door.
ALF Oh my jugs and jiggers, she’s coming out of it. Look here, you take that end.
BOB Hold her up, hold her up!
ALF She’s heavy, I’m telling you. They feed them women up like Strasbourg geese. Look sharp now.
BOB There’s hell to pay if she’s not buckled in.
(They get her on the bed. Much buckling and strapping.)
VIRGINIA Who are you? Where am I? I have been diving through seas of horror to come up rotting in dirty ditchwater. Don’t touch me!
(She starts struggling when it’s too late. She’s already buckled in. The men rest, gratified but exhausted.)
ALF Nothing to fear, my lady. You’re all right now. You’re safe here at Dalingridge Hall.
(His last words reverential)
VIRGINIA Dalingridge Hall! Now the agony begins, horror has seized me with its fangs! I am turned, I am tumbled, I am stretched and everyone pursuing!
(She starts screaming)
ALF Hypo! We need a hypo!
(ALF and BOB rush about panicked. Enter LEONARD. Exit orderlies.)
LEONARD What is it? What’s happened?
VIRGINIA Dalingridge Hall! They’ve taken me to Dalingridge Hall!
LEONARD Virginia, your brother Sir George and his wife Lady Margaret have kindly lent us this splendid mansion. They’re staying up in London and have left it all to us. Up to date comfort. Plenty of servants – French chef – the food is magnificent. Eleven bathrooms! Spotless, hygienic, – the nurses are impressed I can tell you.
VIRGINIA Now this monstrous ugliness is explained. I hear the crack of antlers as if the beasts of the forest are rearing, plunging among the thorns. One has pierced me. One has driven deep within me. You have left me to undergo this squalid humiliation served out like soup by greedy, casual scullions, coarse, ogling, brushing, destroying everything, smearing even our love with impure fingers. “What is this secret sin, this untold tale, that art cannot extract nor penance cleanse?” Don’t you understand? ALL DEATHS ARE ONE DEATH.
LEONARD
Would you like to see Sir George?
VIRGINIA
George! That obese alligator who used to roll me round my bed of an evening as if I were a minnow shut up in a tank with a frenzied whale. I would rather touch a decaying dogfish than that man’s body.
LEONARD Hush, Virginia. George is an Adonis, a true man of the world, adored by great ladies and parliamentarians alike.
VIRGINIA George has the eyes of a sow! Or is it an elephant? Sows look so much like elephants on the Duckworth side of the family. He used to fondle me so I couldn’t read my Greek. The very locusts deform the trees with their lusts.
LEONARD George claims chastity until hi marriage. That’s more than I managed.
VIRGINIA What liars men are! George was a pig, snuffling, rolling, grabbing, calling me Beloved. How he tortured both of us, me and Vanessa alike, Greek slaves in the harem promised him by Eton. He smothered us with caresses until Nessa told Dr. Savage and Dr. Savage made him stop. George told Dr. Savage he was only comforting us for the illness of our father.
LEONARD Virginia, you’re romancing. Dr. Head says longing for adult attention creates a wish-fulfillment leading to ideas like these. He says the only way out is the talking cure.
VIRGINIA So it’s wish fulfillment that has trapped me in George’s house? Dr. Head is another booby, Leonard. We were right to dismiss him. He knows nothing.
(she grabs him)
Don’t you understand that we are poured to the very edge of the abyss, Leonard, where we shall be broken together into nothingness and flames? Help, help! Get me out of this thing!
LEONARD Dearest, you threatened to harm yourself, remember? You attempted suicide.
VIRGINIA You left the veronal unlocked. I thought it was an invitation. My father praised the Duke of Bedford for having the courage to shoot himself. Surely you longed to be rid of me. I’m a bad bargain all around.
LEONARD
No Virginia, no. I love you. I moved heaven and earth to save you.
VIRGINIA But I’m already dead, Leonard. I am certainly in hell. Fallen in a duck pond and strangling in duckweed! Quack, quack!
LEONARD Virginia, why do you reduce me to madness too? If you could only comprehend how insane you sound.
VIRGINIA You can’t think what a raging furnace it is to me, madness and doctors and being forced. I am bent like a tree under a remorseless gale. The crass blindness that poisons childhood still threatens bitter storms. Children will be trodden under. Speech is false. The demand to submit must always be returned with cries of pain, hate and rage because that’s all they understand.
LEONARD You were violent, Virginia. You attacked your nurses. Don’t you remember?
VIRGINIA I was defending myself. They attacked me! Forcing food down my throat. I will go down with my colors flying. Father used to say, “Face the inevitable with eyes wide open.”
LEONARD You vomited on Lily and you struck Susan with a platter of cold meat. You must eat to gain weight, Virginia. Then the voices will subside, the doctors say. That’s why they’ve ordered a rest cure.
VIRGINIA Those doctors! My life is a constant fight against doctors’ follies. That cretin, Savage? He’s not fit to be about. Borrowed from another century.
LEONARD Four doctors and all of them in agreement. You know this, Virginia. You chose Head yourself – because Roger Fry recommended him – Vanessa suggested Craig and I found Hyslop.
VIRGINIA Really, a doctor is worse than a husband. I’ve given up expecting doctors to listen to reason. If only those pigheaded sawbones could see I speak the sober truth without excuse! Alienists know absolutely nothing. Their vanity is as profound as their ignorance. What does their “treatment” amount to? It is all eating and drinking and being shut up in the dark, sequestered with lunatics.
LEONARD The food here is delicious. May I bring you some?
VIRGINIA Once when we travelled by train to St. Ives the lemonade spilled on the sandwiches and turned them into mush but Nurse still made us eat them and I was sick and then I was punished. Leonard, don’t you see that when I am weighted with food I can no longer make the moments flow together. I become an excreter, an excretion. No, of course you don’t see. You’re in a conspiracy, plotting against me. I see your grinning, I know your subterfuge, I hear you sneering behind my back.
LEONARD Virginia, the people who love you are trying to decide what’s best for you. I’m trying to make the best decisions I can.
VIRGINIA You’re punishing me for disappointing you. For being a bad wife.
LEONARD When you’re well, you admit you’ve been mad.
VIRGINIA My sister wanted to be rid of me. While she threw away our father’s possessions I lay in bed and heard the birds singing Greek.
“What bird so sings, so yet does wail? Tis the ravished nightingale Jug, jug, jug, tereu she cries And still her woes at midnight rise.”
LEONARD You’re hurting yourself with all this wild talk. No one can understand anything you say.
VIRGINIA People know very well enough but it’s a secret. King Edward spewed the foulest possible language amongst the azaleas and yet they crowned him. “Swallow, my sister, O Sister Swallow,” I sing. If I become king of the lunatics shall I escape molestation? God, I wish I were dead. I will soon have to jump out of a window.
LEONARD These violent oscillations, Virginia! If I could only get you to see! A whirlwind brings madness in its wake!
VIRGINIA How long can any man love a woman without driving her mad? How long can I protect my clean visions from the odious masculine point of view – from the egotism of men? You crack my brain like a thrush cracks a snail – hammer, hammer, hammer.
LEONARD I am not your enemy, Virginia.
VIRGINIA Then who else is? Why shouldn’t I be frightened? I wanted to spend my life innocently indifferent among the trees and rivers but instead men expose themselves whenever I step out doors. I saw a woman pinned beneath a car and horses falling in the street. Outside our scullery a man cut his own throat. His jowls were whitened as codfish. The human face is hideous. What are you doing? Don’t touch me!
LEONARD Trying to loosen your straps. You’re getting excited. Doctor!
After my fiancé graduated law school in Kentucky, we came East – where our families lived – to get married. I applied to Brooklyn College for the MFA program and was hired as a writing fellow. What followed was an experience so discouraging I can well understand why graduate students are at a high risk of suicide.
First, there’s the contrast between the high prestige of the position and the pitiable pay. You could literally make more money (and spend the same amount of time) combing the subway for lost change.
Next, there’s the “job” they want you to do, which is to prepare seriously undereducated freshman to write an essay justifying their admission into the hallowed world of academe.
I had fun developing my own syllabus, which was basically teaching critical thinking in the most fun way I could possibly imagine. A teacher “reviewer” who came to watch the class wrote me a rave review – I don’t think anyone in my life has ever praised me as much as he did. I still cherish that evaluation. But don’t get excited – the second guy (months later) disparaged me so much that if you add the two reviews together I think you’d have to give me a sad C-. But at that point, They Knew About Me – that I had no college degree -and so they were trying to get rid of me. Really, you can’t blame them – how could I prepare students to get something I didn’t have myself? And what – you may ask – was wrong with MY thinking and reasoning powers that I had not expected this?
The truth is, I had flouted “rules” all my life – they always seemed ridiculous – and because I was a “rara avis” I usually got away with it. But clearly, this could not continue. Much chastened by my brush with the universe (which represented itself as “sanity”) I did go ahead and get a BA degree in psychology from LaSalle. I even got half a masters under my belt from Springfield College until I saw that it was useless.
But back to Brooklyn. There were classes I took, of course, in WRITING – which was my absorbing interest and passion. I kept the fact that I had actually published a novel a secret because the class expressed such a tragic belief that being published was their deepest desire and most desperate and holy quest. I knew that it was the writing of the book itself – finding the subject AND the expression that was your spiritual release into the world – that was the most important absorbing and exciting. My first book was written to specifications – what was “popular” – under the ingenuous theory that I would develop important publishing relationships (my editor lost her job, my company bought out and revamped.) You could hardly brag about an experience like that.
For my class on the Novel I decided to write a novel. I thought it would be fun. If you wrote a chapter every week you would have a novel at the end.
One of my classmates was an ex-nun – a most interesting person – whose experiences strongly affected me. I effortlessly adapted her into my heroine, because my book was a mystery. Surely these are the easiest to write – they must evolve according to a plan. You have to introduce the problem, then the suspects, give clues, and make the reader care about the outcome. I had an idea it would be less emotional than my first book, which got bogged down into a bizarre love story about a fatherless girl pathetically seeking mentorship. THIS book would be all business.
I got such massive pushback from the class I’m kind of surprised I went through with it – but I was enjoying the writing and the characters were alive to me. “Criticism” in class was students laboriously reading each others’ work, describing its emotional effect on them and describing different ways things could be said. The forward motion of a novel – the sweep, the assumption of power – was thereby utterly dissipated. Everyone just rewrote the first chapters of different books endlessly. So it shouldn’t have been called “Novel Writing”, it should have been called “Paragraph Writing” – a class I wouldn’t take.
This teacher and I butted heads on all kinds of issues. First off, he said great writing couldn’t have a “happy ending.” I saw his point but I thought it shallow. Surely completion of a quest – solving a mystery – is an enormous relief. But mysteries aren’t serious writing, he insisted. (Uh oh. Since I was engaged on one.) Well, what about the Odyssey? Jane Austen? {Probably Tom Jones, if I could recall the ending.)
MODERN literature!! He insisted. We can’t have happy endings anymore!
That was when I realized the whole thing was bogus. If I was bogus, they were even more bogus. I was eight months’ pregnant at the time and this man’s feeble philosophy defied the spinning of the planets, the arrival of spring, the creation of Life itself. What a silly fellow.
I finished Pinch of Death, and still reread it with pleasure, A very charming book.
EVA I am gnawed by an aching hopeless wish. Loneliness leads to breakdown, Becomes dementia. I batter Around the rooms of this castle, However brightly-plumaged, Knocking into furniture, A tragic bird who’s trapped indoors. Even dizzy with drink I maintain the frigidity Of an Edwardian hostess Intolerant of scenes at meals. Without you life’s a half-lit room.
EVAN I’ve become a character in your melodrama An absurd creature of romantic vice. Hopeless dilemma.
EVA What could be more beautiful than our ten days in New York, Walking among the perverted architecture. No loss of illusion, rather an increase. I’m in the midst of a dreary financial crisis, Having breakdown on my feet. I hope I don’t sound too shocked and sad. You are life to me as nothing is. My fingers still tremble, Touching you after 17 years.
EVAN This is the Eva I first met, first knew, first loved. We waited it out and didn’t lose each other. I was sane or mad to doubt you & myself. We are like two people sweating blood I feel further from you than ever. I dread losing you But Elayna’s power still holds me. I fear I may do one of you harm.
EVA Thanks for the money, I hope it doesn’t embarrass you too much. You are a reviver and a balm. We must be in Paris together before we die.
EVAN If you want me to be unselfish, let me be unselfish. You are my greatest friend. I’m Trying to keep off the drink while you’re here, Otherwise I know I’ll wreck everything. Three manhattans makes me crazy. Your feverish cheer does not seem solid. Is this the wreckage of our love? Once frightened of your clinical eye Now I’m more frightened of my own. I’ve matriculated in Your fearful university.
EVA We sheer away in horror Scenting fumes of evil As we lose control. Defeat and exhaustion, alarm and despondency. Demoralized and sad. Slam down the lid on pain and resentment: I have taken against your family. Let’s dance. To sit In silence denigrates our love.
EVAN My heart aches for you. We talked for the first time in weeks About hurt and resentment. I could manage my life if it weren’t for you And you could manage yours if it weren’t for me. You infect me with your despair and I flee to my wife To release the pressure. Her quickening influence works my imagination.
EVA I hate that you are in New York without me. You pervade that place as God pervades our hearts. My life is based on my assumption Of togetherness and my Secret fear you’re being got at When we could be snug together. I obsess that you’re in places where I’m not. I could not live without seeing you. I dread our visit may turn sour.
EVAN Everything except your beautiful self rusts Or dies or goes away. My love only seems dead; it’s alive underneath. If you die I shall never forgive you We need ideas that are less about ourselves.
EVAN I hurt Elayna tonight But there’s no help for it. She cares for me and I only care for a life apart. A clean break, an amputation Makes me frantic and guilty. She says we have a happy marriage only because She willed it. This smell of death and decay Makes me long for sex. Could you help me find a girl – any girl you choose – Or will you call me a sex mad degenerate? Panic makes my hands shake. I thought of Elayna and I wept.
EVA I received your sad, wild letter. I accept that you can’t free yourself. Do you accept it? I feel so very near you. I accept that you make sex Desperately with strangers – Do you accept it? Can anyone love such a cold-blooded person?
EVAN How silly I am, I thought I was reconciled to our ending, Expected a falling off of tension & illusion. But it’s a prospect I can’t face.
EVA Miracles happen but The gift of love causes guilt & pain.
EVAN I am utterly becalmed. What I dread most is silence, The latest form of impotence. I need stringing up and tautening. Revenge on love. Revenge on me.
EVA I am suffused with love because I am free. My work becomes our child, An extension of us. Immortal. Still, Something vanishes when you’re not there.
EVAN Elayna broke her hip. How irreplaceable she is to me. Our brand of married happiness is entirely unsung. I shrink to leave her even for a day.
EVA I’m sorry it’s not fatal. Am I dispensable to you? You love no one. If you turn against me I’ll die in a week because I have no one looking after me.
EVAN Turn against you! Agonizing! In spite of the hangover of humiliation I broke down all reserves so we could be together. A very happy day and I was sorry to leave you.
EVA Wed & sad. Past distress is muffled by age & habit. Today we meet formally as if at a garden party. A promise unfulfilled.
EVAN You looked so ill I was nagged by fear I bored you. I long for the happiness of old age, Guilt free, pain free, fear free. In your silence I feel your calming hand.
EVA I invited Elayna to lunch.
EVAN I am not best pleased. The day you come to like each other Our love will die. It will be Poison to our love. Elayna rarely admits depression. I have had not just love but loyalty. Your ghost will haunt me till I die. You force ruthlessness. It is a good thing your throat is sore Or you would never stop talking.
EVA Are you sending me your signet ring? I want something solid to remember you As I dodge death, fight off this Paralyzing loneliness. Our last communion.
(EVA fades away. EVAN is alone.)
EVAN Is the flaw in love a flaw in me? I never should have married. My heart jumps with pain like a hooked fish. I am rudderless. Upon your death My ring comes back, All your contrivances revealed. Now you are gone, I find you everywhere. We will never see each other again; Never, never, never. You are gone from me forever. I walk the streets and weep. Is this delayed shock? Boredom or despair? I will never cease to feel this pain till I cease feeling anything. For the last three nights, I dreamed of you. Did I anger you, neglect you? It’s too late to pray – I await your final book with horror. I need to know I was your life. Please Come back one last time to tell me Just for an hour. If you ever thought you loved more than I You are revenged.
EVAN Do you really love me? Why should you? I don’t seem any longer To be able to cope with friendships.
EVA It is a horror, an outrage That we should not be here together. I struggle against The wound of not knowing where you are each minute. Everything you do is more important to me than my own life. The whole of me is with you. I see and feel you so distinctly, your beloved cold hand in mine Your touch on the nape of my neck. Both joy and agony – my insides torn by pincers. A double goodbye would have been awful – two bites on the bullet of pain. This love is like something we have given birth to. We must never blunt our imagination or tenderness. Don’t get a cold in your soul.
EVAN I disappoint everyone. I deliberately left one of your letters for Elayna to find. With me love is linked with A need to betray. I invite possessiveness. She made me promise our love would never be physical. I lied fluidly.
EVA Even the thought of Such a loss of pleasure tears at my heart Like some medieval torture. You harrow me unbearably. My defenses are down. I’m filled me with a sense of ghastly injury. How I wish I were more beautiful – It’s my mouth that ages me. I want you seeing all of me – Even if it hurts. You are your own child, You preserve your youth with the harm That you cause. I am dead and already Interred – in you. You are my eternity.
EVAN You can’t have everything. I am kept aloft by the conflict of Unbearables. I am happy.
EVA Our dancing life is over – Shall I enter a convent? There’s no point in being alive if we’re not together. I show my deepest self to you alone.
EVAN Please – no more shaming conversations Over Irish whisky. Let’s cut our losses And get some fun from life.
EVA
The gash in our love might close But I can’t forget it’s there. Life with you is a remote happiness to which I cling.
EVAN And all this time you write Fantastic books. If you were as unhappy as you say, You couldn’t write so well. I am the whetstone on which you sharpen – I should be thanked for all your works.
EVA You shed your light around me. I am always aware of that other world we share – Or do we? Our pattern seems set – If treachery can’t break it, There is no death.
EVAN I am losing interest in sex. My bed gets so icy in the small hours of the morning – I feel I am trying to communicate with the spirit world. I am in limbo and will never escape this place. The adolescent remains alive in me, I have a Panic fear of conformity. So I cast myself as the elderly rake. I’m the bore – Marriage gets me down.
EVA When you go on and on about yourself You’re a man I don’t recognize. I prefer your adolescent self. The man of the house is a free agent. A respected prowler Who looks benevolently upon the faces of his womenfolk. Then he’s away – with mistresses or boyfriends. In my attack of loneliness, I’m housebound, Eating baked beans and drinking stewed tea.
EVAN In other countries women Are less bossy and more decorative.
APOLOGY FROM ALYSSE – Somehow the first version of this came out in Plaintext! Sorry.
Film Review: Spellbound
A Viennese psychiatrist in this movie demands a dream “the more cock-eyed, the better” and Hitchcock obliges with this wildly uneven picture offering us Alfred at is best and worst. This film about psychoanalysis is schizy; pretentious, illogical, childish and afraid of its own emotions. Unfortunately it starts with an awkward, talky beginning in which misogynist doctors accuse Ingrid Bergman (for the first time in her life, I’m sure) of being a “glacier” who’s uninterested in men.
No one heats up a screen like Ingrid Bergman, shooting smoke and fire in all directions from the get-go and it will surprise nobody to find out she and Gregory Peck conducted a hot affair during filming.
Dr. Constance Petersen is a psychoanalyst at an upscale Vermont looney bin full of nymphos and weirdos, galvanized by the arrival of Gregory Peck as the new doctor in charge and he’s just as worked up about her. It doesn’t even faze her to discover that he’s an impostor, the real Dr. Edwardes is missing and her swain is accused of his murder.
The film begins to gather speed as the couple goes on the run together with Connie telling everyone they’re on their honeymoon. She takes the amnesiac to her training psychotherapist’s house in Rochester where she promises to “cure” him.
Her teacher tells her that “love smitten analysts playing dream detectives” make “the best patients” but she is making good progress breaking down Peck’s resistance when the police show up and the couple flees to a ski resort called “Gabriel Valley”.
The famous dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali is pretty interesting – gamblers in a club decorated with eyes, a man tumbling down a rooftop and a masked man laughing behind a chimney brandishes a wheel. Constance interprets this as her boss murdering Edwardes on a ski vacation to prevent the younger man from replacing him and framing her lover for the crime.
When she tells this discovery to her boss he threatens her with the very same gun, but she faces him down and he shoots himself instead. Seen from the killer’s perspective the gun fires directly at the screen.
Film ends with Constance Petersen and her Big “100% Cured” male making out at the train station. To get to this point Hitchcock had to battle a sappy film score, (Bernard Hermann wasn’t available), a bossy, clueless, tone deaf producer (David O. Selznick) and a woman-hating screenwriter (Ben Hecht) to ignite a modicum of his signature passion and suspense. At least it was a huge hit and broke all records. What a film this could have been without the frozen art direction, the awkward rear projection and the hysterical film censors. Someone should definitely take another stab at it.
Alysse Aallyn 