Arnold Wesker’s “Chicken Soup With Barley”: A Study

ARNOLD WESKER’S “CHICKEN SOUP
WITH BARLEY”: A STUDY

Arnold wesker became a dramatist after numerous jobs - much of the time he was a pastry-cook-but since writing plays he has become the administrative head for Centre 42, a play producing Trust ed by the Trade Unions. He now understands the business of running a theatre from the inside as did Shakesphere and Ben Jonson in the Elizabethan Age.

Wesker’s special contribution to the British theatre lies in drama­tising the working class participation in the socialist movement of Britain. The Wesker Trilogy - Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959), and I’m, talking about Jerusalem (1960) - “is a significant exploration of the impact of the Communist movement in Britain on a working-class family in the East End through two generations, from 1936 to 1959”¹. The play moves on two levels: the political movement as it affected two generations of the East End Jewish family of the Kahns, and the search for fulfilment of different personalities.

The feeling which governs Chicken soup with Barley is re­markably mature. There are three acts, in 1936, 1946, and 1956. The action is that of time, politics, and social change on Jewish East End family, the Kahns. The play contains excellently the change from idealism to disillusion, from the Spanish Civil war to the Hungarian uprising, while characters themselves change from young revolutionaries to middle aged petty capitalists. Sarah Kahn, a small fiery woman of 37, is the central character. Her movements indicate great energy and vitality. She is a practical woman of the world who does not set store by books as her dreamy husband, Harry, does. She contemptuously turns down the suggestion of her husband that she should read Upton Sinclair’s book:

            Books! Nothing else interests him, only books. Did you see anything outside? what’s happening? (13)

Harry is 35, a European Jew like Sarah. He is a congenital liar and lethargic. He did not stick to any Job for morethan a few days and he is never a man to be depended upon in times of crises. As a matter of fact, when his daughter was seriously ill, he disappeared and it was Mrs Bernstein’s chicken soup with barley that saved Ada. Sarah, in exasperation and despair, asks him.

All my life I’ve wanted to know what you’ve gained by a lie......you’re not a good liar. I’ve always known when you’ve lied. For twenty-five years it’s been the same and all the time I’ve not known what it’s about. But you know - no one else knows, but you do. I’m asking you Harry - let me be your doctor, let me try and help you. What is it that makes you what you are? Tell me - only tell me. Don’t sit here and say nothing. I’m entitled to know - after all this time, I’m entitled to know........so look at him. He sits and he sits and he sits and all his life goes away from him (53).

Sarah’s vigorous but ineffective attempts to make him more active are skilfully interwoven into the hubbub of political idealism and youthful eagerness.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936 fired the imagination of all fellow­-travellers, both young and old. Spain was the battlefront and the streets of London were “mobbed” with people protesting the atrocities perpetrated by the Fascist rule. Many, like Dave Simmonds, enlisted themselves in the International Brigade and left for Spain. Harry aptly sums up the doings of the people at the time as “mad”. Many young men like Monty Blatt joined the battle were simply carried away by youthful excitement of war without thinking much about the consequences. Dave Simmonds the pacifist, engaged to Sarah’s daughter-Ada, warns them:

            The war in Spain is not a game of cards, Monty. You don’t pay in pennies when you lose. May they lose many more! .... Sometimes, Monty, I think you only enjoy the battle, and that one day you’ll forget the ideal. You hate too much (23)

Any big excitement can be a holiday to a worker. It was the period when all the world was a communist, and the working class characters seemed to have no doubt that something great was going to happen very soon. They had a purpose in life, were sure of the direction of their struggle and happy in their consciousness of dedicating themselves to the cause of class struggle in a capitalist system. As Harry says, “I tell you, show a young person what socialism means and he recognises life! “(32)” The political issues are almost inseparable from Wesker’s characters and seem as much a part of the household as a cup of tea”. Sarah Kahn’s kitchen is the meeting place for all the fire-eating fellow­ travellers where over a cup of tea and sandwiches momentous decisions were taken. The song, “England arise, the long long night is over” (30) was on everyone’s lips.

With the second act in 1946 - ten years after the first - we witness a petering out of the glow of idealism which brought them all so close. The route that Wesker takes is littered with invitations to get lost. But Wesker steers his way with great skill, taking care, in not reducing his play to the level of slogan shouting. For example, the change of socialist climate from the militancy of 1936 to the post-war realism of ten years later is pointed out by Sarah Kahn’s.

            Ah! Harry, you couldn’t even make money during the war. The war! when everybody made money. (36)

It is done without having her step a fraction out of character or her nagging role in the relationship.
The Labour government has given the Kahns a better flat in Hackney but has taken away that enthusiasm which characterised and enriched their life in the East End. It is now a life of petty struggle to make both ends meet, without any great cause to fight for. The constant quarrel between Sarah and Harry, which was the only discordant note in the family, seems to have become more embittered with the passage of years. Sarah’s faith sustains another blow when Ada (their daughter), declares that she no longer has any faith in political activity, is tired of living in the jungle of an industrial society and determined, when Dave comes , to live a simple life in the country. When Harry has his first stroke, Sarah is left with nothing but her faith in communism, and Ronnie’s future. But Ronnie turns out no better than his father. After all, he is his father’s son. When Ronnie begs his mother not to grumble against an old ailing father because she has two splendid children, a fine son-in-law, and a grandson, sarah cries out in despair.

I haven’t seen my grandson yet. My daughter lives two hundred miles away from me and my husband is a sick man. That’s my family, well, it’s a family, I suppose (53) and she pleads with Ronnie not to make a mess of his life. The process of disillusionment that started with the second act is complete in the third, which opens in 1955. The party has disintegrated; many of its members were disenchanted and left it for good. The glow of idealism which brought them all so close has died out. The whole Committee of Jewish Anti-Fascist League was liquidated by Russians. Monty Blatt and many young men could repose no trust in “a big, lousy world of mad politicians” (62) “ There’s nothing more to life than a house, some friends, and a family,” (62) Monty says. “And when someone drops an atom bomb on your family?” Sarah demands. But she never dwindles to a mouthpiece for opinion; politics is only one element of the showdown between herself and her son which ends the play.

Wesker manages the picture of slow disintegration in the family of Sarah Kahns with dexterity throughout. Even Ronnie’s future disillusion­ment is foreshadowed in a subtle manner. “I have all the world at my finger tips. Nothing is mixed up. I have so much life that I don’t know who to give it to first,” (48-49) he boasts. One can see that his enthusiasm for socialism, his ambition to write a socialist novel in one night are nothing but ineffectual effusions of youth. Completely disillusioned with Life, he ends up as a pastry cook in Paris. It is a tedious life with no future prospect of promotion. Ronnie comes home one evening to declare.

I’ve lost faith and I’ve lost my ambition.....My thoughts keep going pop, like bubbles. That’s my life now you know? - a lot of little bubbles going pop” (73)

We are in late 1956, with Ronnie’s faith in mankind torn to shreds by the Soviet Union’s repressive action in Hungary, the last straw in the multiple process of disillusionment. He tells his mother, “ You’re pathological case, Mother.....you’re still a communist’:(73) From Sarah’s answer it emerges that her enemy is less Capitalism than apathy:

All my life I worked with a party that meant glory and freedom and brotherhood. You want me to give It up now?.....If the electrician who come to mend my fuse blows it instead, so should I stop having electricity? I should cut off light? Socialism is my light, can you understand that? A way of life. (73-74)

She enables us to view apathy in precise terms. It is the worker’s contentment with possessing a television set; it is nihilism and the philosophy of the absurd; it is her feckless husband, Harry; and here and now it her son, sunk in despair. The play has shown it spreading relentlessly over this little community. It is this Death wish contested at this point only by Sarah’s stubborn dislike of people in authority and faith in an idea of brotherhood. “Ronnie”, she shouts at him, “if you don’t care you’ll die” (76) It is this great faith in an ideal that makes Sarah the only positive character in the play. Her lone fight against the disillusionments of life lends tragic dignity to her character. She, with her positive attitude tow ads life, tries to lift her son from abysmal depths of despair. The mother-and-son confrontation is the confrontation of the positive and the negative at the conceptual level. At the end, there is still hope though bleak for the Kahns will pull through and Sarah’s strength of character will arrest the cancerous growth of the disintegration of the family. All may yet be well.

NOTES:

1. A. D. Choudhuri, Contemporary British Drama, (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinman, 1976), p. 48.

2. Laurence Kitchin, “Drama with a Message” Arnold Wesker in Modern British Dramatists A collection of Essays ed. John Russell. Brown (New Delhi: Prentice-Hall of India Private Limited, 1980) p. 79.