Travesties by Tom Stoppard Read Free Book Online

I believe it was the Eighteenth, the one beginning ‘Vergleichen solle ich dich dem Sommertag, Da du weit lieblicher, weit milder bist?’
    CARR : But surely, in German it’s hardly worth the trouble.
    TZARA (
Cheerfully
): Oh, completely pointless. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be Dada. Well, who should come in but Ulyanov, also known as Lenin, with a group of Zimmerwaldists.
    CARR : That sounds like the last word in revolutionary socialism.
    TZARA : It is. At Zimmerwald in 1915 we called on the workers of the world to oppose the war.
    CARR : We?
    TZARA : Well, I dine with them, and, in fact, was doing so on this occasion when someone at the bar piano started to play a Beethoven sonata. Lenin went completely to pieces, wept like a child. When he recovered he dried his eyes and lashed into the Dadaists! – ‘decadent nihilists, flogging too good for them’, and so on. Fortunately, the name Tzara meant nothing to him, but a few days later I met him at the library and he introduced me to Cecily. ‘Tzara!’ said she. ‘Not the Dadaist, I hope!’ I could feel Lenin’s eyes upon me. ‘My younger brother, Tristan,’ I replied. ‘Most unfortunate. Terrible blow to the family.’ When I filled up my application form, for some reason the first name I thought of was Jack. It has really turned out rather well.
    CARR (
With great interest
): Cecily knows
Lenin
, does she?
    TZARA : Oh, yes, he’s made quite a disciple out of Cecily. She’s helping him with his book on Imperialism.
    CARR (
Thoughtfully
): Did you say the reference section?
    TZARA : They agree on everything, including art. As a Dadaist, I am the natural enemy of bourgeois art and the natural ally of the political left, but the odd thing about revolution is that the further left you go politically the more bourgeois they like their art.
    CARR : There’s nothing odd about that. Revolution in art is in no way connected with
class
revolution. Artists are members of a privileged class. Art is absurdly overrated by artists, which is understandable, but what is strange is that it is absurdly overrated by everyone else.
    TZARA : Because man cannot live by bread alone.
    CARR : Yes, he can. It’s
art
he can’t live on. When I was at school, on certain afternoons we all had to do what was called Labour – weeding, sweeping, sawing logs for the boiler-room, that kind of thing; but if you had a chit from Matron you were let off to spend the afternoon messing about in the Art Room. Labour or Art. And you’ve got a chit for
life? (Passionately) Where did you get it?
What is an artist? For every thousand people there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.
    TZARA (
Hard
): Yes, by Christ! – and when you see the drawings he made on the walls of the cave, and the fingernail patterns he one day pressed into the clay of the cooking pot,
then
you say,
My God, I am of these people!
It’s not the hunters and the warriors that put you on the first rung of the ladder to consecutive thought and a rather unusual flair in your poncey trousers.
    CARR : Oh yes it was. The hunter decorated the pot, the warrior scrawled the antelope on the wall, the artist came home with the kill. All of a piece. The idea of the artist as a special kind of human being is art’s greatest achievement, and it’s a fake!
    TZARA : My God, you bloody English philistine – you ignorant smart-arse bogus bourgeois Anglo-Saxon prick! When the strongest began to fight for the tribe, and the fastest to hunt, it was the artist who became the priest-guardian of the magic that conjured the intelligence out of the appetites. Without him, man would be a coffee-mill. Eat – grind – shit. Hunt –
eat
– fight –
grind
– saw the logs –
shit
. The difference between being a man and being a coffee-mill is art. But that