from
The Real Thing
by
Tom Stoppard

Annie:
[...] He loves me, and he wants to punish me with his pain, but I can’t come up with the proper guilt. I’m sort of irritated by it. It’s so tiring and so uninteresting. You never write about that, you lot.

Henry:
What?

Annie:
Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.

Henry:
[...] I don’t know how to write love. I try to write it properly, and it just comes out embarrassing. It’s either childish or it’s rude. And the rude bits are absolutely juvenile. I can’t use any of it. [...] Anyway, I’m too prudish. Perhaps I should write it completely artificial. Blank verse. Poetic imagery. Not so much of the ‘Will you still love me when my tits are droopy?’ ‘Of course I will, darling, it’s your bum I’m mad for’, and more of the ‘By my troth, thy beauty maketh the moon hide her radiance’, do you think?

Annie:
Not really, no.

Henry:
No. Not really. I don’t know. Loving and being loved is unliterary. It’s happiness expressed in banality and lust. It makes me nervous to see three-quarters of a page and no writing on it. I mean, I talk better than this.

Annie:
You’ll have to learn to do sub-text. My Strindberg is steaming with lust, but there is nothing rude on the page. We just talk round it.

Henry:
[...] I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn’t one’s lover. Only two kinds of presence in the world. There’s you and there’s them. I love you so.

Henry:
Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

Annie:
You’re jealous of the idea of the writer. You want to keep it sacred, special, not something anybody can do. Some of us have it, some of us don’t. We write, you get written about. What gets you about Brodie is he doesn’t know his place. You say he can’t write like a head waiter saying you can’t come in here without a tie. Because he can’t put words together. What’s so good about putting words together?

Henry:
It’s traditionally considered advantageous for a writer.

Annie:
He’s not a writer. He’s a convict. You’re a writer. You write because you’re a writer. Even when you write about something, you have to think up something to write about just so you can keep writing. More well chosen words nicely put together. So what? Why should that be it? Who says?

Henry:
Nobody says. It just works best.

Annie:
Of course it works. You teach a lot of people what to expect from good writing, and you end up with a lot of people saying you write well. Then somebody who isn’t in on the game comes along, like Brodie, who really has something to write about, something real, and you can’t get through it. Well, he couldn’t get through yours, so where are you? To you, he can’t write. To him, write is all you can do.

Henry:
Jesus, Annie, you’re beginning to appal me. There’s something scary about stupidity made coherent. I can deal with idiots, and I can deal with sensible argument, but I don’t know how to deal with you.

Annie:
It’s his view of the world. Perhaps from where he’s standing you’d see it the same way.

Henry:
Or perhaps I’d realize where I’m standing. Or at least that I’m standing somewhere. There is, I suppose, a world of objects which have a certain form, like this coffee mug. I turn it, and it has no handle. I tilt it, and it has no cavity. But there is something real here which is always a mug with a handle. I suppose. But politics, justice, patriotism – they aren’t even like coffee mugs. There’s nothing real there separate from our perception of them. So if you try to change them as though there were something there to change, you’ll get frustrated, and frustration will finally make you violent. If you know this and proceed with humility, you may perhaps alter people’s perceptions so that they behave a little differently at that axis of behaviour where we locate politics or justice; but if you don’t know this, then you’re acting on a mistake. Prejudice is the expression of this mistake.

Annie:
Or such is your perception.

Henry:
All right.

Annie:
And who wrote it, why he wrote it, where he wrote it – none of these things count with you?

Henry:
Leave me out of it. They don’t count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. It doesn’t count. He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech... Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

Annie:
There’s no system. People group together when they’ve got something in common. Sometimes it’s religion and sometimes it’s, I don’t know, breeding budgies or being at Eton. Big and small groups overlapping. You can’t blame them. It’s a cultural thing; it’s not classes or system. There’s nothing really there – it’s just the way you see it. Your perception.

Billy:
Bloody brilliant. There’s people who’ve spent their lives trying to get rid of the class system, and you’ve done it without leaving your seat.

Annie:
Well...

Billy:
The only problem with your argument is that you’ve got to be traveling first-class to really appreciate it.

Debbie:
[...] How’s old Elvis?

Henry:
He’s dead.

Debbie:
I did know that. I mean how’s he holding up apart from that?

Henry:
I never went for him much. ‘All Shook Up’ was the last good one. However, I suppose that’s the fate of all us artists.

Debbie:
Death?

Henry:
People saying they preferred the early stuff.

Henry:
It was about self-knowledge through pain.

Debbie:
No, it was about did she have it off or didn’t she. As if having it off is infidelity.

Henry:
Most people think it is.

Debbie:
Most people think not having it off is fidelity. They think all relationships hinge in the middle. Sex or no sex. What a fantastic range of possibilities. Like an on/off switch. Did she or didn’t she? By Henry Ibsen. Why would you want to make it such a crisis?

Henry:
I don’t know, why would I?

Debbie:
It’s what comes of making such a mystery of it. I was like that when I was twelve. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at meretrix, a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. Meretrix! This was none of your amo, amas, amat, this was a flash from the forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn’t be at one and the same time – I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all. That’s what free love is free of – propaganda.

Henry:
Don’t get too good at that.

Debbie:
What?

Henry:
Persuasive nonsense. Sophistry in a phrase so neat you can’t see the loose end that would unravel it. It’s flawless but wrong. A perfect dud. You can do that with words, bless ’em. How about ‘What free love is free of, is love’?

Henry:
It’s to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy ... we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a pack of cards? Carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what’s shared – she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone everything is pain.

Charlotte:
There are no commitments, only bargains. And they have to be made again every day. You think making a commitment is it. Finish. You think it sets like a concrete platform and it’ll take any strain you want to put on it. You’re committed. You don’t have to prove anything. In fact you can afford a little neglect, indulge in a little bit of sarcasm here and there, isolate yourself when you want to. Underneath it’s concrete for life. I’m a cow in some ways, but you’re an idiot.

Charlotte:
Remember what I said.

Henry:
What was that? Oh ... yes. No commitments. Only bargains. The trouble is I don’t really believe it. I’d rather be an idiot. It’s a kind of idiocy I like. ‘I use you because you love me. I love you so use me. Be indulgent, negligent, preoccupied, premenstrual ... your credit is infinite, I’m yours, I’m committed...’ It’s no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst. Is that romantic? Well, good. Everything should be romantic.

Henry:
[...] We start off like one of those caterpillars designed for a particular leaf. The exclusive voracity of love. And then not. How strange that the way of things is not suspended to meet our special case. But it never is. I don’t want anyone else but sometimes, surprisingly, there’s someone, not the prettiest or the most available, but you know that in another life it would be her.

Henry:
Yes, you’d behave better than me. I don’t believe in behaving well. I don’t believe in debonair relationships. ‘How’s your lover today, Amanda?’ ‘In the pink, Charles. How’s yours?’ I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn’t seem much different from not loving.

Henry:
And I’m supposed to score points for dignity. I don’t think I can. It’ll become my only thought. It’ll replace thinking.

Annie:
You mustn’t do that. You have to find a part of yourself where I’m not important or you won’t be worth loving.

Annie:
It’s Bach.

Henry:
The cheeky beggar.

Annie:
What?

Henry:
He’s stolen it.

Annie:
Bach?

Henry:
Note for note. Practically a straight lift from Procol Harum. And he can’t even get it right.

Annie:
I’ll stop.

Henry:
Not for me. I won’t be the person who stopped you. I can’t be that. When I got upset you said you’d stop so I try not to get upset. I don’t get pathetic because when I got pathetic I could feel how tedious it was, how unattractive. Like Max, your ex. Remember Max? Love me because I’m in pain. No good. Not in very good taste. So. Dignified cuckoldry is a difficult trick, but it can be done. Think of it as modern marriage. We have got beyond hypocrisy, you and I. Exclusive rights isn’t love, it’s colonization.

Annie:
Stop it – please stop it.

Henry:
The trouble is, I can’t find a part of myself where you’re not important.

Annie:
You shouldn’t have done it if you didn’t think it was right.

Henry:
You think it’s right. I can’t cope with more than one moral system at a time. Mine is that what you think is right is right. What you do is right. What you want is right. There was a tribe, wasn’t there, which worshipped Charlie Chaplin. It worked just as well as any other theology, apparently. They loved Charlie Chaplin. I love you.

Annie:
[...] I’m sorry I hurt you. But I meant it. It meant something. And now that it means less than I thought and I feel silly, I won’t drop him as if it was nothing, a pick-up, it wasn’t that, I’m not that. I just want him to stop needing me so I can stop behaving well. This is me behaving well. I have to choose who I hurt and I choose you because I’m yours.

Annie:
Please, don’t let it wear away what you feel for me. It won’t, will it?

Henry:
No, not like that. It will go on or it will flip into its opposite.