The Habit of Art: A Play Read Online Free Page B

early.
    Stuart Well, I’m not late. Is it you?
    Boyle Do I look like an ex-Professor of Poetry?
    Fitz You do, actually. That’s just what you do look like.
    Kay Fitz.
    Stuart So he’s not here?
    Boyle Apparently not.
    Stuart I’ll wait then. ( He sits down. )
    Boyle You can’t wait here. We’re just going.
    May Are you an undergraduate?
    Stuart No.
    Boyle You could be anybody. He has books. Papers. And there’s a typewriter somewhere.
    May He can’t just leave you, not with a typewriter. What are you, then?
    Stuart Me? I’m freelance.
    Boyle My advice to you would be to go away. Try later. Sit on a seat somewhere.
    May There are seats in the Meadows. I often sit there.
    Stuart If he comes can you tell him I’ve been?
    May There are more seats in Broad Walk. Then there’s the Botanic Gardens. Nice seats there.
    Boyle We can’t tell him. We’re going in a minute.
    May Or Corpus. You could sit in Corpus. Some lovely seats in Corpus.
    Stuart is baffled, but goes.
    He looked a nice enough boy.
    Boyle Yes. They often do. I’ve seen him before. Two or three times. Round Gloucester Green.
    May Waiting for a bus?
    Boyle Waiting for something.
    May At five o’clock in the afternoon?
    Boyle What has time got to do with it?
    May But Mr Auden’s been Professor of Poetry.
    Boyle He’s been professor of putting his knob in people’s gobs for longer than that.
    May You’re a man of the world, Mr Boyle.
    They are going.
    Boyle In this college? You have to be.
    Carpenter When Auden left his New York apartment for the last time someone in his building was practising ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’ on the saxophone. An omen, one might think, but not really; as the Brewhouse is not home and never will be. It’s a room that has never made it into literature and one on which its celebrated tenant never wasted any words. Still, poets give voice to the inarticulate universe so it should not seem strange if in the absence of the poet his furniture should take this opportunity to compare notes.
    Kay Only Stephen hasn’t worked out quite how to do this yet. It’s usually Penny and Brian, so bear with us.
    Fitz No chance, author, of my coming in on ‘it’s a room that has never made it into literature’?
    Author And cutting the rest, you mean. Why?
    Fitz Do we need the talking furniture? I know I’m old-fashioned, but why does the furniture talk?
    Author This is a poet. The world talks and everything in it.
    Fitz Yes, I can see the idea. And I love the idea. But the bed talking, for instance. It’s barmy.
    ASM ( brightly ) I know, there could be video!
    Which is not well received.
    Kay Yes, thank you. Anyway, preciouses, this is what we’re doing at the moment. Tom, darling.
    Flourish at the piano.
    The Furniture is played by Stage Management, standing in for Penny and Brian.
    Mirror
    I am a mirror where his squalid reflection
    He, shaving, subjects to indifferent inspection.
    Morning by morning I see that face,
    Dustily return its gaze.
    Clint-divided, crumpled, crazed
    Like the limestone he elsewhere praised.
    The razor’s journey like a polar trek
    Over crevice and chasm and bleeding neck.
    Painfully scraping the soapy blizzard,
    That shaking hand on his withered gizzard.
    Chair
    I am a mirror where his squalid reflection
    He, shaving, subjects to indifferent inspection.
    Morning by morning I see that face,
    Dustily return its gaze.
    Clint-divided, crumpled, crazed
    Like the limestone he elsewhere praised.
    The razor’s journey like a polar trek
    Over crevice and chasm and bleeding neck.
    Painfully scraping the soapy blizzard,
    That shaking hand on his withered gizzard.
    Bed
    I am the bed that he does not share.
    Does anything happen, it happens elsewhere.
    A creature of habit, he sleeps on his right,
    The one time he doesn’t he dies in the night.
    But mine are not the sheets of that distinction.
    Here is not the place of his extinction.
    Auden ( off ) Come up.
    Door
    He comes, he comes, we’ve had our lease.
    This