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17 April
I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines. -Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
— Got Wine (@luv_wine) April 26, 2013
The pair who turn up and sometimes threaten more with innuendo, and what they don’t say rather than what they do, bear these names in Pinter’s The Birthday Party. The Homecoming has the unseen figure of MacGregor, who – so Sam claims at the close of the play – had Max’s wife in the back of the car as he drove.
In Old Times, the Gaelic name is McCabe, mentioned only in the sequences when Kate and Anna seem to inhabit another time and place – or another place and time to inhabit them. But who is McCabe ?
The play’s dialogue accustoms us to the possibility that, for example, we may never be sure whether it was Anna’s skirt that Deeley, with her compliance, looked up – or says that he did.
Anna’s eventually agreeing with him that it was she does not, in itself, signify that it did happen. Yet it does come immediately before Kate’s unleashing her fractured and furious speech about Deeley and Anna, with which the dialogue ends, and leads to the tableau with which it concludes.
The names McCann and McCabe share, to some extent, in euphony, but more so in the fact that they betoken an Irish, rather than a Scots, origin (on the rule that the prefix ‘Mc’ is one, and ‘Mac’ the other). If that rule is valid and if, as it seems, Deeley is an Irish name, could we posit that McCabe is really he ?
The Homecoming’s MacGregor is the only person not referred to by his or her Christian name or a pet form of it (Teddy, Lenny, etc., but just Ruth), although it is shortened to Mac. That pattern seems true in Old Times, because (in Act 2) the other names that Anna uses are Charley, Duncan and Christy – in Act 1, Anna had suggested Jake (whom Kate said that she does not like), or ‘Charley…or…’, and Anna then named McCabe, when Kate asks whom she meant.
Managing, the second time, to break in to whatever is happening between Anna and Kate again in Act 2, Deeley claims that Christy ‘can’t make it. He’s out of town’, and Kate says ‘Oh, what a pity’, before, after marking silence, the three talk together ‘normally’ again.
Prior to Deeley’s words, she feelingly and tellingly said about Christy (after saying that she liked him best, and Anna said that he is ‘lovely’) :
He’s so gentle, isn’t he ? And his humour. Hasn’t he got a lovely sense of humour ? And I think he’s…so sensitive. Why don’t you ask him round ?
Even a fondness and admiration for another man twenty years ago – or is it now ? – seems to have been too much for Deeley, too much of a threat, as Anna (after Deeley’s eruption) seems to perceive herself to be:
(To Deeley, quietly) I would like you to understand that I came here not to disrupt but to celebrate.
Pause
To celebrate a very old and treasured friendship, something that was forged between us long before you knew of our existence*.
The description of Christy does not seem to match Deeley’s nature and behaviour, and, with it, comes a portrayal of a time when men friends of Anna’s would be invited around, by Anna, to where Kate and she lived. (That is, if we believe the play’s opening dialogue to the effect that Kate had no friends other than Anna, and in the light of Anna’s saying Would you like me to ask someone over ?)
If he is not Deeley, McCabe is, at any rate, a mystery in Act 1 : in the scenario of the 1950s at its end, Kate says that she will think in the bath about Anna’s hesitant suggestion of asking McCabe, so not the definite rejection that Jake gets. Yet, by Act 2, we have :
Kate : Is Charley coming ?
Anna : I can ring him if you like.
Kate : What about McCabe ?
Anna : Do you really want to see anyone ?
Kate : I don’t think I like McCabe.
Anna : Nor do I.
Kate : He’s strange. He says some very strange things to me.
Anna : What things ?
Kate : Oh, all sorts of funny things.
Anna : I’ve never liked him.
Kate : Duncan’s nice though, isn’t he ?
As two women discussing men whom they know might, they turn briefly to Duncan, having more or less agreed that they do not like McCabe, and then to Christy, whereupon Deeley makes his successful interruption.
In context, then, is that intervention made in genuine fear, because he – McCabe – has heard himself rejected, and it seems that Christy might be asked to come to see Kate in his stead ?
Couple that with how Anna eventually validates Deeley for maintaining that he had a liaison with her**, and Kate’s words to Deeley about Anna’s feelings for him (events which he gives the impression of not quite remembering, not quite crediting, and which Anna does not even attempt to deny), and, with a consequence reminiscent of the unfolding of an Ibsen play, the trap has snapped shut.
For Anna, despite being the one for whom Deeley felt a real attraction, is not the one whom he chose to marry, and he had gone along with allowing Kate to efface the memory and reality of Anna :
He asked me once, at about that time, who had slept in that bed before him. I told him no one. No one at all.
That links back to when, just to Deeley, Anna had been denying his saying that they had had prior contact and having been at the party. Deeley said that afterwards
I never saw you again. You disappeared from the area. Perhaps you moved out..
In negating what Deeley proposes, Anna does not challenge him identifying her as that woman, but simply says No. I didn’t. Deeley then asks where Anna was, and, before he appears to drop the subject, she says Oh, at concerts, I should think, or the ballet.
By doing so, Anna lamely resuscitates the impression of a social whirl for Kate and her with which she launched herself into the play, whereas it seems just as plausible that, at some point, Anna’s world had revolved around The Wayfarers Tavern – despite her protestation I wasn’t rich, you know. I didn’t have money for alcohol., which Deeley rejects by saying that men, himself included, bought her drinks.
Knowing that Deeley is Kate’s husband, Anna maybe does not want to remember, and she does not appear able to parry Deeley’s claims now that he has her alone. He, for his part, almost certainly takes advantage, either of embellishing a real situation, or – if Pinter leaves us thinking it amounts to anything different – fabricating an account so far back that Anna cannot easily and definitely contradict him.
If Deeley is McCabe, any disappearance of Anna could not even be on a figurative level as Kate’s narration of Anna being dead or Anna’s of a man in the room who is sobbing and puts his head in Kate’s lap : that silent closing scenario, with the three of them, is like the dumbshow in Pericles or, more famously, in Hamlet, which sums up what dare not be spoken, but they know as truth, remembered truth.
In writing this, I find myself back at Beckettt’s Play, with Kate, Deeley and Anna linked as are his voices, doomed by an inextricable past…
Postlude
What a bastard relation to appreciating a play reading a text and thinking that one understands it is ! I say this, having just re-read Landscape, from 1968, and feeling an effect from it - an effect so different from a production, a performance, not least with Pinter, where the cumulative effect of the stage-directions Pause, Silence or even Long silence cannot be experienced on the page.
Such a crooked teaching that encouraged one to approach plays - and poems - as texts, when they are merely notated in writing, and live outside it !
My copy tells me that Peggy Ashcroft and Eric Porter were first broadcast on the radio in it, and then, in 1969, Peter Hall staged it (Ashcroft again, but not Porter). That figures. Is it conceivable that Pinter did not hear and know Beckettt's radio play Embers, broadcast first in 1959 ? And this play and also Silence, how they feed into the mood and nature of Old Times
End-notes
* Was the friendship, though, long before ?
** Of which he tells Kate, after telling alone Anna that this is his recollection, with the apparent intent of demeaning both Anna (for being the woman whose skirt he was allowed him to look up) and, by association, Kate herself for letting him become her husband when his interests were not in her, despite his story, with homoerotic mentions of Robert Newton, of meeting Kate at a screening of Odd Man Out.
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