102
PARTISAN REVIEW
other out, still leave one doubting whether it is not sheer impudence for
him to demand a hanging at public expense when he could so easily hang
himself. Like those of an operetta, too, are the various sentiments ex–
pressed by the characters and evidently recommended by the playas a
whole: the constant ribbing of "orthodoxy" in the person of a hidebound
mayor who keeps saying "This will all be gone into at the proper time";
the usual exception made for the genial priest who winks and gets tipsy
and addresses his viol as his "wife"; the assertion of the charms of youth
and love and freedom ("I shall run / Away from laws if laws can't live
in the heart." ) . I like the character of Margaret, the witty and disen–
chanted mother of two roguish boys; hers is a stock part in comedies of
this order; but it is, as so often, written with genuine spontaneity, as if
the author himself aspired to the condition of matriarchy. I also enjoyed
Mr. Skipps, the rag-and-bone man, whose appearance toward the end
has
the same effect on a lagging playas the belated arrival, at a party
that has lasted too long, of some hilarious guest-how
really
hilarious
we do not, in our great need, inquire. For the rest
The Lady's Not for
Burning
left me perversely sympathetic with the hard-pressed mayor,
almost ready in retrospect to prefer Polonius to Hamlet, and wanting
very much to be as sober and literal, old and loveless, hidebound and
orthodox, as possible.
And plainspoken, too, for although I will be told that nothing in
the play matters but Fry's verse, that verse is to me the very definition
of the word
pastiche,
the providentially perfect example of modernism
debouching into Fifth Avenue. Eliot in
The Cocktail Party
is the old
modernist himself, concerned to diminish the intensity of his style and
simplify the content of his mind for the occasion. Fry, on the other
hand, is Fifth Avenue (or Regent Street) cheerfully engaged in availing
itself of the spoils. Sometimes in his happy state of total recall vis-a-vis
Auden and others he is as charming as a Bergdorf Goodman window
trimmed in the colors of Matisse. But there is something in this writer,
or more likely in the exigencies of the dramatic medium as compared
with the simpler art of window-dressing, which makes him reach for the
racy and pursue the quaint like mad. There are highly effective mo–
ments:
I am interested
In my feelings. I seem to wish to have some importance
In the play of time. If not,
Th en sad was my mother's pain, sad my breath,
Sad the articulation of my bones.
...
