Surprisingly Sexy: The House by the Stable

Since Acacia Theatre Company in Milwaukee is putting on CW’s The House by the Stable, I’ve reread the play to see whether I can pick out anything that might be helpful to the director or actors. I’ve already put up a regular book summary about it; now are some notes arising from my observations.

Genre

The play overall is modeled on European Medieval drama. Britannica has helpful little entries about the three main types of Medieval vernacular religious drama: Mystery, Morality, and Miracle plays. Mystery Plays depicted Biblical events, whether from the Old Testament or the Life of Christ. Morality Plays were allegorical, with a representative main character such as “Everyman,” personified virtues and vices such as “Faith” or “Doubt,” and temptation as the main conflict. Miracle Plays dramatized imagined events from Saint’s Lives.

The House by the Stable combines elements from the first two types. It is a nativity play, staging the moment of Jesus’s birth, but the main character is “Man,” and the cast includes “Pride” and “Hell,” while the plot follows their attempts to defraud him of a jewel called “Soul.”  At the same time, an intertwined plot investigates how Man will respond to the needs of Mary and Joseph, who arrive destitute, cold, and hungry the night before she gives birth. The tale of Jesus’s birth is a Mystery Play, while the allegorical drama about Man, Pride, Hell, and Soul is a Morality Play. Williams, then, has cleverly woven the two genres together, one for each plot, into a coherent and original nativity play. They’re so tightly and carefully crafted together that I doubt anyone would feel any tension between them.

Morality Plays often cast actors as the Seven Deadly Sins, or as some of them. Here, we have Pride depicted as a character. In addition, we also see Man led on by Lust (Pride sexually seduces him), Greed (he’s eager to have a house in Hell’s homeland, even if he has to kill to get it), Wrath when he angrily threatens to take Hell’s house by force, Envy that anyone might have a house better than his, and Gluttony and Sloth when he drinks himself into a stupor and orders around his “servant” Gabriel. This is a subtle way to work all seven of the sins into the play without staging them all as personifications.

Williams deploys the allegory cleverly, writing lines that have two readings. For example, Pride warns Man: “I am not easy to kill / by any who have loved me.” Man tells her: “Since I met you I have forgotten my friends. / Love of you tends to that.” So true.

Arthuriana

In addition to those two Medieval dramatic types, Williams also manages to weave an Arthurian thread into this play, as he likes to do in so many of his works. It’s only a light touch: the land around Man’s house and stable has become a Waste Land, just as the lands around the Fisher King’s Grail Castle are barren in so many Arthurian accounts. There is a connection, in both tales, between the fertility of the monarch and the productivity of the land. King Pelles is impotent, wounded through the “thighs,” and therefore none of the women in his kingdom can bear children, none of the animals can reproduce, and none of the crops can grow. The very soil itself has become sterile. Not until the true Grail Knight comes and asks the magical question (“What serves the Grail?”) will he and his land be healed. Here, in House by the Stable, Man laments in an absent-minded sort of way that around his house, “there are no vines now / or few.” He arrogantly theorizes that “were it not for my smile over it” (his tending the land, I guess? or merely his presence?) “the land would be more sterile than it is.” I strongly suspect this is wishful thinking. How could it be “more sterile”? Sterility is sterility. If his land isn’t bearing crops, that’s somehow correlated with his spiritual barrenness. Notice that, although Pride has been his mistress for many years, they have no children. He is sterile, his land is sterile, and his heart is barren of kindness. But here, the causality of healing is reversed: rather than the bearing of children being dependent upon the king’s health and the achievement of the Grail, here the birth of a Child causes healing and is itself an achievement of the Grail.

Conversion

The two genres converge in a lovely, powerful way. Man is essentially in the Morality plot (in the house with Pride and Hell), while Mary is in the mystery plot (out in the Stable giving birth). When Mary is in the throes of birth-anguish, Gabriel calls out to Man; either to come and help or perhaps to come and witness the miracle. Man hears and wonders who is calling, but does not rouse himself from his drunken dalliance with his leman, Pride. This is the first call. Next, Joseph cries out for him, and this time it takes both Pride’s blandishments and Hell’s enticements to distract Man. This is the second call. Finally, Mary herself cries out: “Man, where are you?” (line 225). This time, at the third call, Man calls back: “I am coming.” The three-fold calling echoes such Biblical narratives as the calling of Samuel in I Samuel 3, or the three times Peter was asked “Do you know this man?” (and three times he denied Christ), followed by the three times Jesus asks Peter “Do you love me?” (which most Biblical interpretations say is Jesus restoring Peter as many times as Peter denied Him).

In any case, the moment Man responds to Mary’s cry appears to be his conversion. He thinks of her needs instead of his own comfort, and although Pride and Hell have seized him and are holding him fast, he has enough presence of mind to call out to Gabriel. I read Gabriel here as a metonym for God: in crying out for angelic help, Man is finally calling upon God. Gabriel’s response supports my reading that this is Man’s conversion, because Gabriel announces: “God made me and bade me wait /on this moment in your life.” That’s a pretty big deal: God created Gabriel solely for this particular moment, to save this particular Man—and, in a figure, to save Mankind!

Hell is, naturally, disgruntled at the failure of his and Pride’s schemes and grumbles: “Damn him, who would have thought grace was so near / as to hear that small squeak of a drunken voice?” That’s so lovely. Man only made the merest drunken squeak, barely even asking for help, hardly even aware that there was grace available that he could ask for—and that’s all it took. A little squeak, and grace (in the person of Gabriel) leapt to his eternal aid. While he then sleeps, exhausted by drink, sex, conflict, and the weight of glory, Gabriel beats up Pride and Hell and sends them away.

When he wakes, Gabriel takes him to see Mary and the Baby. The Angel asks the Virgin if she will “expose the Holy Thing.” This is weird wording: an odd way to ask her to show the baby to the man. However, it has a few implications. The word “expose” is chosen, I think, to evoke Eucharistic overtones. There’s a moment in a communion service when the bread and wine are uncovered, preparatory to the congregants’ partaking in them. I picture Man coming hesitantly into his own stable, humbled by what has happened (hat in his hands, as it were), and kneeling before the baby who is swaddled to invisibility in Mary’s arms. Then Mary lifts up a corner of the swaddling cloth and uncovers—exposes—Jesus’s head. Those solemn, infinite, infant eyes gaze upon Man. Man himself is transubstantiated, transmuted, from a base material into a redeemed and holy thing.

Williams liked to use “It” or “Thing” to refer to Christ Incarnate. Take, for example, this description in The Descent of the Dove:

There had appeared in Palestine, during the government of the Princeps Augustus and his

successor Tiberius, a certain being. This being was in the form of a man, a peripatetic teacher, a thaumaturgical orator. […] It talked of love in terms of hell, and of hell in terms of perfection. And finally it talked at the top of its piercing voice about itself and its own unequalled importance. It said that it was the best and worst thing that ever had happened or ever could happen to man. It said it could control anything and yet had to submit to everything. It said its Father in Heaven would do anything it wished, but that for itself it would do nothing but what its Father in Heaven wished.

There is a great deal more of this type of rhetoric, leading up to a threat that “It” would disappear, followed by: “It did disappear—either by death and burial, as its opponents held, or, as its followers afterwards asserted, by some later and less usual method.”

“Some later and less usual method?” You mean RESURRECTION, right?! What an odd way to recount the Gospel. And yet, isn’t that exactly what we need: new and odd and old and strange ways of telling the old, old story?

Submitted Saint

This drama is a lovely way of telling the Christmas story in a fresh manner. Mary’s quiet, contented manner, for instance, is itself inspiring. I often return, on this blog, to Williams’s “Jedi Masters”: those characters in his fiction who exhibit perfect mystical tranquility. In this play, Mary exhibits such a deep peace (passing understanding) after she gives birth. While Man and Gabriel make a great fuss about the discovery of his missing Soul, she merely laughs in a gentle way towards them, then commands the great angelic being to leave her and Man alone to contemplate what has passed. She breathes upon his dusty Soul, making it sparkle. She is content. She is contentment itself, and she blesses the house and its inhabitants with “the joys of love.” Her words end the play, putting Keats and all the nature-worshipping and art-worshipping and beauty-worshipping Romantics their place. Rather than “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” she proclaims: “substance is love, love substance.” Incarnation has the last word.

Sexy Seduction Scenes

But before we get to that last word, we have the dubious privilege of experiencing a whole of lot embodiment gone wrong. As the title of this blog post indicates, there’s a surprising amount of sexual material in this play, specifically make-out scenes between Man and Pride. A large part of Pride’s scheme for keeping Man in her thrall is to make herself attractive to him and distract him by her charms. She gets him drunk and kisses him into stupefaction. There are subtle little clues for stage direction embedded in the dialogue, such as in line 124 when Prides says to Man: “Sweet, we forget my brother.” I take this to mean that their spooning has gotten too intense that it’s become embarrassing to continue it in front of Hell, who is watching. I think Pride is taking it down a notch before it becomes full lovemaking. The same happens again in line 158, when in the middle of seducing both his body and his soul, Pride begs Man: “bear off, my dear; / no, my brother is here.” It happens a third time a few lines later, when she says “I will kiss you so … do you know? wait, my sweet!” Again, I think she’s bringing him right up to the edge of intercourse, then backing off, teasing and frustrating and infuriating and tantalizing him all at once.

Such quasi-tantric practices slightly resemble what Williams reportedly practiced himself on some of his young female disciples, which I find disturbing. Lois Lang-Sims (in Letters to Lalage) and Grevel Lindop (in Charles Williams: The Third Inkling) report many instances in which Williams engaged in some sexual contact with a young woman, resulting in a kind of creative flight-of-speech. As Lang-Sims explains it, the idea was to initiate “physical contact with a woman […] without sexual arousal taking place beyond a certain predetermined point. […] his work demanded these practices: only so could his creative powers be released. […] Charles had become addicted to this strange form of intoxication: he needed to wind himself up into the utmost state of tension of which he was capable, and then to relax into stillness.” In House by the Stable, Man is not engaging in such a practice—but it almost seems as if Pride is inflicting it upon Man without his consent. She works him up to a pitch of arousal, then disappoints him, trying to turn his interest to playing dice or traveling to his supposed new home in Hell’s kingdom. I wonder whether this is CW gentle mocking or interrogating his own practices? However, we know from Lang-Sims’s testimony and his correspondence with her that he was carrying on such practices at this time and for many years thereafter, probably until his death. I wonder whether he was beginning to feel any guilt about using young women in these ways and realized it was due to his own Pride?

Inside Jokes

Similarly, there’s a strange little passage of this play that I don’t quite understand. I mean, I know what it means, superficially, but I don’t understand why CW put it in here, exactly, and what its extra-textual implications might be. Let me explain. Man says, in line 122, that he hasn’t found the jewel, his Soul, anywhere about the place, not “with flesh, fish, or fowl.” Obviously, this just means that he hasn’t found it stored among the provisions of the house, with the stores in the pantry, among the ingredients in the cupboard, or stuffed away in the junk drawer or anywhere else.

But this phrase is a fascinating inside joke—or inside sorrow, more likely. In 1933, CW’s coworker, friend, and rival-in-love Gerry Hopkins published a novel entitled Nor Fish Nor Flesh. It is a bizarre, fictionalized, quasi-autobiography about the love triangle among CW, Hopkins, and Phyllis Jones. The portrait—one might almost say caricature—of Williams is unflattering to the point of cruelty. CW’s heart was broken by Jones’s “infidelity” to him, and he was flummoxed by the fact that she returned Hopkins’s love but not his own. I don’t know why CW would put in an oblique reference to it in this play at this moment. Perhaps he’s feeling like he’s lost his soul among the sorrows of his sordid love life? I don’t know whether there would be anyone attending the 1939 production who would get the “joke”: I don’t know if Jones or Hopkins would have gone to see it. I suppose they may have done, as I think they were both in Oxford at the time, and it was put on by the Oxford Pilgrim Players. Anyway, I don’t suppose it matters much, and maybe he’s just using the common phrase with a little sad, secret smile for himself behind it, but I thought it was worth remarking upon.

Occultism?

There’s one final biographical question I have about this play: How it compares to his earlier hermetic dramas. The Amen House plays from the 1920s and ’30s are deeply magical, even staging elements of Rosicrucian ritual. I haven’t been able to identify any occult elements in House, which is saying something. Indeed, part of the plot is Man’s need to overcome his belief that he is a god. Since the Golden Dawn taught that man is indeed divine, I read this plot element as another rejection of straight-up occultism.

Instead, what we have is evil twisting the things of God and making mocking copies of them. While Mary gives birth to the Baby Jesus (hidden from the audience’s sight, charmingly, by Gabriel’s spread wings), Pride chants an incantation that is a perverted, sexualized version of The Magnificat. “[God] hath showed strength with his arm,” sings Mary, and Pride echoes: “Be my arm of strength, Man.” As they are apparently making out throughout this whole scene, and she is doing her best to use sexual arousal to distract him from his spiritual danger, I take “arm” to be a euphemism. “He hath put down the mighty from their seats,” Mary exults, “and exalted them of low degree.” Pride counters by urging Man: “Be mighty on me; exalt me to your great degree.” I take “Be mighty on me” (and, a few lines later, “Tower over me in your power”) to be a fairly explicit description of sexual conquest, although maybe I’m projecting here.

Without question, Pride is offering a bastardized version of The Magnificat in an attempt to counteract its spiritual power. These scene exemplifies an important theme of CW’s, which he shares with the other Inklings and with many early Christian writers: the idea that evil cannot make anything new. It cannot create ex nihilo: It can only twist and mar and mimic and mock God’s creations. Pride, here, cannot make up a brand-new song or liturgy: she can only echo Mary’s lines and twist them to her wicked purposes. I don’t know whether to go so far as to say that CW was re-evaluating his years in the FRC and the OGD spinoff, whether he now saw their rituals as distorted versions of true Christian rites. I just don’t know. I’ll keep re-reading his later works, though, as well as scholarship by Roukema and others, and let you know if and when I do figure it out.

Meanwhile, Merry Christmas, whenever you happen to be reading this—maybe during Lent, which is when I’m writing it. That seems fitting.