I was reading T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion, which is, I have to admit, a tedious bore to read and which I only took up as an example of a play based on the idea of The Oresteia by Aeschylus. The basis of comparison is very loose. It takes up the Oresteia late in the sequence of the trilogy, Harry – the current owner by inheritance, an inheritance (including the family home of Wishwood) he resists taking up as much as Orestes does that of Agamemnon, after the latter’s murder by his mother Clytemnestra. Yet he is also returning home, after the death of his wife who had fallen (or was she pushed – and more precisely was she pushed by Harry?). He is at the play’s start to arrive on the evening of Amy’s birthday. He may not arrive by the start of dinner and the rest of the family are to start without him. But, in the event, he gets home early.
Well, here I am ready to dine with the family, though I dread it. I will wait in the ancient herb garden where the smell of thyme mixes with smells I do not know – except for that of lavender. Lavender is such a strong smell – it reminds me of people trying to stop time in the evidence of moths that eat up everything that covers your nakedness. Meanwhile, inside, I think I am not expected. I see Amy, the Dowager Lady Monchensey, though she seems in so morbid a mood, whilst also being as imperious with her servants as ever.
Her man, Denham, comes to organise the room for the evening – light the lamps and make the shadows retreat that are crowding around Amy. This is how T.S. Eliot imagines her dealing with this intrusion, which she welcomes because it is a token of the fact that she still holds sway of power over her servants that she can display to her sisters who sit with her. She knows that she is the cause of everything they do on her command and they must never prejudge her wishes:
Amy
Not yet! I will ring for you. It is still quite light.
I have nothing to do but watch the days draw out,
Now that I sit in the house from October to June,
And the swallow comes too soon and the spring will be over
And the cuckoo will be gone before I am out again.
O Sun, that was once so warm, O Light that was taken for granted
When I was young and strong, and sun and light un-sought for
And the night unfeared and the day expected
And clocks could be trusted, tomorrow assured
And time would not stop in the dark!
Put on the lights. But leave the curtains undrawn.
Make up the fire. Will the spring never come? I am cold.
Agatha
Wishwood was always a cold place, Amy.
Having dinner with Amy is good but her sisters, even Agatha – the most interesting with a strong feel for the past importance of the family and the stately house they represent. But she is so literal! I can see Amy wince at the refusal of Agatha to see, or perhaps to acknowledge she sees though she in fact sees quite plainly, that the ‘cold’ that strikes Amy is that which continually chills her, when she imagines that, though her servants keep the rituals of time as she wishes and when she wishes, time is very much asserting its control over her with its intimations of mortality.
When the clocks stop for her, night might never turn to day nor the seasons cycle as they were wont. Indeed, the pace of time seems to have the strength she once had but now seeks from it in it in its warmth and light. Even the pace of her speech slows down time, or attempts that without succeeding, and even though the line, ‘I have nothing to do but watch the days draw out’ is one the slowest I have ever heard, it is only probably an effect of the preponderance of single syllable assonantal words,
The other sisters try to buck Amy up. They choose their subject unwisely – the thought of ‘wintering’ in the warmer South, just as during the Raj, English gentlemen wintered in the cooler North in India.
Ivy
I have always told Amy she should go south in the winter.
Were I in Amy's position, I would go south in the winter.
I would follow the sun, not wait for the sun to come here.
I would go south in the winter, if I could afford it,
Not freeze, as I do, in Bayswater, by a gas-fire counting shillings.
Violet
Go south! to the English circulating libraries,
To the military widows and the English chaplains,
To the chilly deck-chair and the strong cold tea—
The strong cold stewed bad Indian tea.
I think Eliot gets the unashamedly ‘English’ Gerald, the brother of the deceased Lord Monchensey, to hint that Amy might rather prefer the superior service of the servants of the far South, he means India, to those of the cold English. He also gets the pain of the non-heirs, wasted boys and women reduced to a flat in Bayswater. But Amy is Queen of tbe English class system. Any hint that she lacks that kind of control rouses her ire and tsunamis her emotions beneath the veneer:
Amy
My servants are perfectly competent, Gerald.
I can still see to that.
The sisters and uncles start going on about the vulgarity of the younger generation, which rather upsets niece Mary, who leaves. The conversation does go on interminably. Somebody ought to change the subject! Gerald finds a way! Referring to the younger young men on the way to joint them: ‘That reminds me, Amy, / When are the boys all due to arrive? ‘ But Gerald just doesn’t get it. For Amy that brings Amy back to her old bugbear of the uncontrollable nature of time, and the losses against which every desire in her body is set. Hence, it takes her some time to answer Gerald’s question:
Amy
I do not want the clock to stop in the dark.
If you want to know why I never leave Wishwood
That is the reason. I keep Wishwood alive
To keep the family alive, to keep them together,
To keep me alive, and I live to keep them.
You none of you understand how old you are
And death will come to you as a mild surprise,
A momentary shudder in a vacant room.
Only Agatha seems to discover some meaning in death
Which I cannot find.
—I am only certain of Arthur and John,
Arthur in London, John in Leicestershire:
They should both be here in good time for dinner.
Harry telephoned to me from Marseilles,
He would come by air to Paris, and so to London,
And hoped to arrive in the course of the evening.
I am beginning to wonder if I no longer wish to have dinner with Amy, Dowager Lady Monchensey. Will she keep going on about how old I look and say, straight to my face: ‘death will come to you as a mild surprise, / A momentary shudder in a vacant room’? I am not sure I could cope with the doom and gloom – even as everyone is now beginning to think Amy is leaving it late to have her servants light the lamps.
But then I realise, it is not her gloom and fear of change that worries her, for there is that in her that thinks nothing ever changes, unless she allows it too – that her control may be as great over time, change and loss as over Denham and the other servants and professionals that visit – even that glum doctor who keeps hinting at the state of her heart. I see Agatha run straight into the trap, raising her belief that Harry, when he returns will find the changes to his childhood home hard to adapt to:
Agatha
....
Harry must often have remembered Wishwood—
The nursery tea, the school holiday,
The daring feats on the old pony,
And thought to creep back through the little door.
He will find a new Wishwood. Adaptation is hard.
Amy is having none of that. She snaps back at Agatha:
Amy
Nothing is changed, Agatha, at Wishwood.
Everything is kept as it was when he left it,
Except the old pony, and the mongrel setter
Which I had to have destroyed.
Nothing has been changed. I have seen to that.
Suddenly I remembered that at Wishwood dinner was only relieved by the way the ‘mongrel setter’ (I knew him as Ben) was the only person I liked when I visited last and then only saw him after dinner, slinking down the servant’s stairs. And besides it was dark in the herb garden now. Perhaps the ‘black bat, Night, has flown’. I think I’ll join Maud and go for dinner with Tennyson instead. By all accounts you can forget yourself dining with him:
Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
To each, but whoso did receive of them,
And taste, to him the gushing of the wave
Far far away did seem to mourn and rave
On alien shores; and if his fellow spake,
His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
And deep-asleep he seem'd, yet all awake,
And music in his ears his beating heart did make.
Well that seems a night indeed, and not far from Wishwood is his home at Hazlemere.
with love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxxx
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