Remembering Mr. Christopher Fry

Remembering Mr. Christopher Fry
Dr. S. Krishna Sarma

Mr. Christopher Fry is dead (June 30, 2005). I got the news two months after the event. He had completed 97 years. I learn that he was quite agile and active till almost the very end. So, shall we say Mr. Fry was 97 years young when he died?

It was in January 1982 that I first met him. I was on my way from the US, and my hosts drove me down to East Dean in Sussex. Mr. Fry was very pleased to meet yet another scholar who had worked on his plays. He chatted about the plays and some of the actors who were involved with them etc. It was a very pleasant and casual ‘interview’, which really was not an interview. I was more interested in capturing his voice on my tape.

He took us round East Dean. He was about 75 then, but the way he walked with a spring in his stride, jumped over the puddles, and chatted with his booming voice, you could have placed his age around 45-50.

I had got in touch with him in 1969 when I decided to publish my doctoral dissertation. I had sent a copy to him for permission to publish a work on him and to quote from his works. He was quite gracious. He not only gave his permission, but he also wrote to the OUP to permit me to use copyright material. He furnished explanation to a couple of problems. I mentioned during my analysis, and added a footnote to one of my comments. By and large, he was quite appreciative of the analysis.

I kept in touch with him ever since. I would write to him on some of my projects or some work I had read in Commonwealth literature which I was teaching around that time, he would seek clarification on the modes of naming in India, which struck him as strange   appeared un-English, unidiomatic or exotic. I would explain the many modes followed in various parts of India, especially in regard to organising the names and surnames. Or he would ask about some cultural aspects. But mostly he wrote about the amount of attention The Lady had been receiving not only in England, but even across Europe. He would describe how he had been invited to be present at the rehearsal of the play by a company in London. Chichester, or elsewhere in England, or about how the play had been translated into German, and how he had been invited to Vienna for the premiere of the play.

He loved The Lady’s not for Burning. It is easily the most popular play, though Venus Observed would just manage to scamper to the second place: it could not overtake The lady, in spite of Sir Laurence Olivier. Reading these two plays and seeing Mr. Fry, one could easily realize how much of him went into the two protagonists. Mendip and the Duke, wit, sense of life, humour and poetry. One could visualize the two characters as carrying that glint in the eye, an unmistakable trait of Mr. Fry, accompanied by that inevitable chuckle: “That same laughter, madam”, says Mendip, “is an irrelevancy which almost amounts to revelation”. Mr. Fry’s laughter was infectious. It was full-throated yet gentle, teasing yet friendly and, paradoxically for Mendip, showed a man in love with life, one full of joie de vivre. So too, one would be reminded of him as one considered the Duke chatting with Reedbeck, vying with his son, joking with Jessie, or making love to Perpetua.

The second time I met him was in July 1989, again as I returned from the US through England. His wife had passed away in late 1981, “unexpectedly and unnecessarily”, he would say in his letter. He took us, me and Dr Srinivasan my host, to the site where Mrs. Fry had been buried. The spot was on a rise in a corner of the graveyard, a spot that could be seen from the window of his house ‘The Toft’. Looking at the spot, and looking at his house from the spot, I was put in mind of another romantic pair, in India, Shah Jehan and Mumtaz Begum of the Taj Mahal fame, except that there was no river Yamuna flowing by the grave in East Dean. I could imagine Mr. Fry looking from his bedroom window at the spot where his lady was buried, even as Shah Jehan must have looked across the space to the mausoleum where his beloved queen had been buried.

He showed us the tombstone. A very interesting one. It was a double stone, or a single stone with two names. The name of Mrs. Fry — Phyl Fry — was carved on the right side of the stone. He got his name too carved on the left side, for he had reserved the neighbouring plot for himself! Very thoughtful? Practical? Romantic? And, he quipped, almost in the style of his own Mendip, “Death too would not part us”!!

I sure hope that his body was laid to rest in that spot he had reserved for himself by his wife’s side.

On this second visit, he gave me a copy of his last play, One Thing More or Caedmon Construed. This play is not too dissimilar in tone and structure to his first play, The Boy with a Cart. One could trace a graph of his plays in terms of the poetry in them and their artistic maturity. The graph would take the shape of an inverted ‘V’, at the peak of which we could place Venus Observed and The Lady’s not for Burning. This did not mean that there was a falling off. Certainly not in theatrical virtuoisty. But one noticed a lessening of the poetic sparkle and shimmer that characterized his earlier plays. One noticed a gradual decrease in the component of poetic richness in the plays after Venus. We notice an absorption of the sparkle into the fibre itself in The Dark is Light Enough, Curtmantle and A Yard of Sun, though we would feel that this technical maturity could not compensate for the loss of the verbal brilliance, “the melody of the spoken word”. Therefore the inverted ‘V’.

He had come on to the scene when poetic drama in England had been begging for a voice. After a long stretch of arid, realistic prose drama, Eliot had come up with some fascinating plans for bringing poetic drama to English stage. Murder in the Cathedral and A Family Reunion had not satisfied him. Though the first play was acceptable with all its poetry, he felt embarrassed by the presence of poetry in the latter play. Then he pared the verse line clean of all vestiges of poetry - pared it to the bone, as it were. This resulted in The Cocktail Party, followed by two plays so prosaic that one would find it hard to call them ‘poetic’.

About the same time, perhaps a couple of years behind Eliot, came Fry on to the scene with his religious play, The Boy with a Cart, in 1936. He proved more prolific than Eliot who did not have much of an opinion about this young man too prodigal with his verbal music and his welter of metaphors,  “word-smith”, “word juggler”, riled the critics; they derided Fry’s “fanciful persiflage”, verbal “pyrotechnics”. Eliot had opined that Mr. Fry should learn to be less poetical if he wanted to write poetic plays. Whatever the critics said about the plays and the verse in them, in praise or in derision, the audiences had been pleased with “the melody of the spoken word”, a Shakespearian prodigality that had not been vouchsafed on the British stage for such a long time. A quick succession of plays. The Firstborn, A Phoenix too Frequent, Thor, with Angels, besides The Lady and Venus Observed, showed that here was something more enduring than a mere flash in the pan.

He continued to write beyond ’56 when Eliot ceased to have anything to say in dramatic terms. The post-Venus plays show less of verbal pyrotechnics and a mellowing of the verse line, tighter, deeper, and therefore more lasting in impact.

It does not come as a surprise that One Thing More is almost entirely written in prose but for the songs of Caedmon. As in his first play, here too, we find little of drama. But the poetry too seems to reach rock bottom Like Eliot? Do we see Mr. Fry following in the footsteps of Eliot, the later Eliot? This is not much in evidence. The imagist Fry is as active here as in the early plays:

Up out of the blind soil
Flowers fetch their brilliance
Mined like gold and gemstones. . .

The songs Caedmon sings are biblical both in theme and rhythm.

Why did he use so much prose, uncharacteristically, in this last play? I did not ask him to explain the reason for his ‘apostasy’. What differentiated 1986 from the 1936-49 period when his plays were devoured by the British audiences lock, stock and barrel, word-smithy, pyrotechnics, persiflage, all included? Maybe that generation has gone: “The fashionable theatre was swinging in a different direction”, he had been saying at our first meeting. The new generation, like that of the 20s, is unpoetic, or prosaic, or they do not know what they want, a generation that could applaud Edward Bond’s Lear as easily as Shakespeare’s King Lear’. Or Mr. Fry had done his bit of contribution to poetic drama wihle his energies held; and it was for someone else to take up the task. He makes Caedmon say at the end of the play:

Master, forgive me for this loitering.
I am reaching towards you now.
My hands were full of dear discoveries
But earthly time can have them . . .

He was as much writer of comedy as of poetic lines, the reality, the absurdity, the miracle that life was (to Fry), struck his protagonists with rare ease that underlies their response to the world and its mystery, “The cake of dung” attitude of Mendip and the Chaplain’s act of faith in his own existence envelop a whole range of odd, comic attitudes to life, and Fry himself explained how these ambivalent stances of his characters are central to his world view.

It may take some time for the likes of Mr. Fry to return to English drama. It may take ages, even aeons. Mr Fry was such a rare combination of scintillating poetry, bewildering comedy and gripping drama, Praying for his soul, let us celebrate the sojourn of Mr. Fry with us in the words of WH Davies,

A rainbow and a cuckoo’s song
May never come together again.