‘Posterity Is Vulgar’

The playwright Harauld Hughes, who was born in 1931 and died in 2006, remains little known and seldom read. His work, which includes Platform (1960), Table (1961), and Shunt (1965), is rarely staged in the US. His groundbreaking collaborations with the Norwegian director Ibssen Anderssen on films such as The Swinging Models (1966), The Especially Wayward Girl (1967), and The Deadly Gust (1973, and still the best film I’ve seen about an evil breeze) have bypassed even the most plugged-in genre aficionados. What’s more, Faber and Faber’s recent three-volume reissue of Hughes’s oeuvres complètes—The Models Trilogy, Four Films, and Plays, Prose, Pieces, Poetry—barely registered on the cultural cardiogram.^*

So why have people forgotten the recipient of the 1986 Euripides Prize for short-form drama (the only award that entitles the winner to six months’ complimentary mask hire)? Granted, Hughes’s last play, 1972’s Dependence, was roundly dismissed as “more pause than play” and “a new Mount Everest of inwardness” by The Times. Hughes also stopped writing for the cinema after O Bedlam! O Bedlam!—his state-of-the-nation address that sought to combine the supernatural with skiffle. The film, if reports are to be believed, collapsed during production, and we know that, within the cinematic arts, there is no sin greater than failing to make a profit. Hughes, the legend goes, ate the sole copy of the script when its putative director, Leslie Francis, had the temerity to offer a note. Hughes then threw the film’s producer, the nightclub owner and kung fu ambassador Mickie Perch, out of a helicopter.

Later that year, after an excruciating television appearance during which he pulled down his trousers in answer to Lucian Freud challenging him to a tug-of-war, Hughes was put in literary limbo. Of all the extant limbos, literary limbo is the one, ironically, that’s the most difficult to describe. Before people spoke of cancellation, before “selling out,” before the slight drift to the right that is the fate of many who develop a taste for public discourse, there was “literary limbo,” and no one, not even Jeffrey Archer, has survived it—and Jeffrey Archer, lest we forget, is a convicted criminal.

Perhaps this is as it should be. “Posterity,” as Orson Welles once lamented, “is vulgar.” What do we Hughesians care when the craven populace withholds its modish approbation? How can we trust a public that uses words like “selfie,” “skin care,” and “solutioning” without a flicker of self-hatred? But I have, as Hughes’s first biographer, Augustus Pink, once put it, “the zeal of the convert.” I can’t let so much Hughesian treasure languish unseen in the rancid sod of disinterest. For my first true experience of theater—of what language can do—was the West End revival of Hughes’s Roost (1962).

My father had literally dragged me out of a school lesson and hurled me into his newly acquired Lotus Elan. His plus-one had reneged, and he hated being alone. I remember the steady howl of the engine, his breath like sour cream left in the sun, the half-eaten goose thudding in the glove compartment, the menstrual red of the safety curtain, a throb of anguish in my neck, the darkening of his eyes as he told me to stop talking about my “concerns,” the dew of his pre-play “shush” arcing in the glare of the footlights.

Then came the words. Slithering syllables snaking and darting, secreting their poisonous payload. Half-beats begetting elision, pregnant pauses metastasized into tumors of room tone. Who spoke like this? Who had the courage to give voice to such thoughts? Hitherto my precocious interest in language and the intricacies of speech was dismissed as a form of hysteria, a womanly weakness. My father warned me with mounting vehemence that I would never please a man if I insisted on expressing myself. That a man, after a day’s work, simply needed a physical release and something sugary. I was expected to turn my rage in on myself, privately and without fuss; to get married, publicly, with a good deal of fuss; and to be able to make a fuss-free shepherd’s pie that could serve twelve if you padded it out with French bread and chunky salad.

Indeed, after the muted curtain call, when my father calmly announced that he was leaving my mother, this time for two women (my aunt and one yet to be sourced), I didn’t even scream until I was on the bus back to boarding school. I was a good little girl, a meek handmaiden to an unbending hierarchy. But I had an urge to question, an urge that couldn’t be sated by needlework alone, no matter how challenging the repair.

Later that evening, once the last heave of tears had come to a shuddering halt, I tried to call my mother. Unless you were informing on a fellow student, use of the school telephone was prohibited, but I was on good financial terms with the head groundsman, Angus, and he said he’d drive me to the nearest pay phone if I promised to buy him a bottle of Bacardi on the way back.

“Hello? Who’s calling?”

“It’s me.”

“Who’s me?”

“Your daughter.”

“Which one?”

“Your only daughter. Chloë. I’m Chloë.”

The rain seeped under the rust-wracked wall of the phone box, releasing the aroma of its urine-darkened floor.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“I am in school.”

“Don’t they have lessons?”

“It’s Saturday.”

“What about Saturday lessons?”

“Those are in the morning.”

“I thought it was the morning.”

“Did you just wake up?”

“No. I woke up earlier.”

“When?”

“When the phone rang. Someone called me.”

“Who called you?”

“Don’t know. Someone called Chloë.”

“I’m Chloë.”

“So you keep telling me.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You just have.”

It could have been a Harauld Hughes play. Angus started to tap the horn.

“Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“Is it true about Daddy?”

“Nothing’s true about Daddy.”

“Daddy told me he’s left you.”

“You saw Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“How was he?”

“Surprisingly well.”

“I haven’t seen him for ages.”

“And you don’t mind?”

“Why would I mind?”

“You don’t mind that Daddy’s left?”

“Well, if Daddy didn’t leave, how could he come back?”

“And you’re just going to accept it?”

“What choice do I have?”

“You can choose not to accept it.”

“That’s hardly a choice.”

“But it’s not right. It’s not right that he can just come and go.”

“That’s what men do, dear. They come and they go.”

Could this be true? Is this what life held in store for me? To be a makeshift skiff tossed and splintered by sequential squalls of men’s self-interest? To be picked up. To be dropped. To be left. To be grateful for any returns, no matter how diminishing.

I felt Hughes speaking to me. Demanding my liberation.

“For God’s sake, Chloë,” I heard him thunder. “Be brave. Hang up on that sodden harridan. She’s a narcissist paddling in the juice of her self-pity. She cannot understand you. Only Artists like me can understand and respect you. Come join me and the other warriors brave enough to work in the Arts!”

“But how?” I protested. “I have no real interest in the Arts.”

“That’s OK,” he said. “You can become a professional theater reviewer.”

And that’s when it hit me. Although I might not have the guts to become an artist or a theater reviewer, I could certainly write features and comment on zeitgeisty cultural matters.

“I have to go now, Mother. I’m going to become a journalist.”

“Chloë, calm down. There’s no need to do anything so drastic. You’re always so hasty.”

“I’m not being hasty; it’s just something I need to do immediately.”

“No one needs to be a journalist, especially not immediately. Fail at some other thing first; then you can think of writing the occasional piece.”

I could hear the chink of ice in her tumbler.

“Chloë! Are you there? Listen to me, young lady. Daddy and I didn’t educate you so you could parasitically pass off prurience as genuine inquiry…”

I hung up before she could repeat the rest of my father’s oft-rehearsed rant. Father felt his career as a novelist of military fantasy had been scuppered by unfavorable notices, rather than his dire, thin plots—desultory interludes linking a raft of risible sex scenes that he described as “frank.”

When I got back in the car, I told Angus I wouldn’t be buying him any more alcohol and that, in fact, what he was doing was wrong and it wasn’t the only wrong thing I knew he was doing. I would write and partially stage a rock operetta about power imbalance. I would set fire to the chemistry lab. I would leave school. I would sue the school. They would pay me off. I would start a literary magazine. I would give it a one-word title that people would begrudgingly admit was clever once they looked up what it meant. I decided to read everything, to see everything, to marinate myself in poetry and, when necessary, prose.

Hughes was my guide now. Hughes liked journalists and thought they deserved to be treated like human beings. I was a human being. I was a journalist. Maybe I could become the first human journalist. I would one day meet Harauld Hughes. He would thank me for “my support,” for being one of the few who understood him. He would then call me by a name that was not my own, for he had confused me with another journalist.

As far as this underpaid freelancer is concerned, Harauld Hughes remains a lodestar, the undisputed apogee. Unpretentious, faultlessly punctuated, and unbounded by the petty concerns of narrative consistency, Hughes likened one of his dramas to a bullet: “Compact, bloody noisy, and, if you don’t aim it right, it’ll explode your own eyes off.” Just as no one can truly be happy in jeggings, our society cannot heal without a detailed knowledge of Hughes.

The next time I heard from my mother, ten years had passed. She wanted to let me know that my father had had a heart attack. Mother had been right. About my father coming back to her. He had soon tired of his assignations. Like Harauld Hughes once said, the logistics of marital betrayal takes nearly all the fun out of it. I hadn’t spoken to him since that matinee of Roost, not that he’d noticed. He was too busy ignoring several other of his children as they lurched performatively from one crisis to another. Mother had never told him I was a journalist. Finding out is what had given him the heart attack.

He had read an article of mine. An article about Harauld Hughes.

“Speak to your father,” Mother said. “He won’t live forever.”

“What have you learned?” my father said. He had lost none of his capacity to make me feel responsible for any extant failing, even that of language itself.

“What do you mean?”

“From this job of yours? Being a journalist. Profiling people. Finding things out. What have you discovered about—say—Harauld Hughes?”

“Oh, I couldn’t say. Maybe nothing.”

“I saw one of his plays once. Can’t remember who with. Can’t say I thought much of it.”

“That was me.”

“What do you mean by that?”

There was a long pause.

“Well, I’m going to hand you back to your mother now.”

But he had hung up. I didn’t call back. I was tired of being the site of his ad hoc excavations.

Hughes knew well the impossibility of knowing what others meant. How we cover our febrile bodies with words; how we skitter unseen in our semantic caverns. But there is no hiding from Harauld Hughes. His hunting ground is our collective unconscious; he is not fooled by our camouflage; he will shear the wool from our startled peepers; he will pour his heart into our naked eyes. Harauld knows who I am. Harauld knows us all. How else could he write like that?