KARLSRUHE AND MILTON HAYES
After the discomforts of the trenches and the tedium of a fortnight’s
travelling, Karlsruhe provided a delightful haven. Here all the material
needs were satisfied; there was a Red Cross issue of tin foods three
times a week: the beds were moderately comfortable, and one’s clothes
could be disinfected: and there was a library. After a fortnight’s exile
from books there is no joy comparable to the sight of a printed page.
And in the evenings we were allowed out till eleven o’clock. There were
big arc lamps under the trees, and in this romantic atmosphere the
greater part of the camp lay out reading in deck chairs. It was easy
then to cast a false glamour over imprisonment; to see in it a
succession of harmonious days; a quiet backwater in which the mind was
free to work. It was easy to bathe the emotions in the ordered periods
of George Moore’s prose, and reflect that there “lay no troublous thing
before.” It was the reaction natural after the turgid experiences of the
last eight months, and it certainly made that one week at Karlsruhe
lyrical with content.
Karlsruhe was a distributing station through which all officer prisoners
passed on their way to permanent camps. But there was always retained a
small committee of officers to superintend the activities of this fluid
community. There were officers to look after the issue of relief
parcels, to run the library, to control general discipline. In charge of
the Red Cross Committee was Tarrant.
Fourteen months of captivity had not made much impression either on his
cheerfulness or on his health. In fact he looked and felt so fit that it
caused him some alarm.
“I’m too well,” he said, “I’m thinking of trying a fast.”
“He’s been saying that every day for the last month,” remarked Stone,
his room companion.
“Oh, no, old man, really,” protested Tarrant, “I’ve only been waiting
for it to get a bit warmer.”
After the wearisome discussions about the incidental aspects of the war,
it was an enormous delight to meet two people to whom the events of the
last year had been a matter chiefly of conjecture and report.
“You will get awfully sick of all this, of course, after fourteen
months,” said Tarrant, “but it’s really a capital place to get one’s
ideas settled.”
One is always extraordinarily polite to a person one meets for the first
time. After three days the need for politeness goes. But on that first
occasion the opinions of the other are treated with a laborious respect.
Conversation takes a turn of, “Of course that’s quite true, but I must
say that personally ...” and that was the way that Tarrant listened to
my heresies on the first evening. Long before I had vanished from
Karlsruhe, however, the respectful tone had degenerated into, “Won’t do,
old man, won’t do,” and there have been times since, when I have emerged
sadly tattered from some war of dialectic, that I have longed wistfully
for those early days.
The next afternoon Tarrant was in a chastened mood.
“I’ve begun my fast,” he explained. “It was not so bad after breakfast.
But by lunch time it got pretty awful, and by now....”
“It gets better after the third day, I’m told,” Stone hazarded.
“You know,” Tarrant went on, “before I began this fast, I made a whole
pile of arguments in favour of it; but really at this moment, I can’t
remember a single one.”
“Shall I suggest a few?” said Stone.
“No, thanks.”
However, the resolution held good, and for the space of five complete
days he did not eat a morsel of food. The moment it was over he
declared it to be a capital scheme, and recommended it to all his
friends.
* * * * *
It was at Karlsruhe that I met Milton Hayes. Off the stage he is in
appearance very much like the remainder of humanity, but no one who has
met him once could ever forget him. He is the one man who has accepted
Popular Taste as a constant thing, has defined that thing, and found a
theory on which to work.
The majority of popular artists always adopt an attitude of, “Well,
there must be something about my stuff, I don’t know what it is, a
little trick, something that hits the popular fancy. I can’t explain
it.”
But Milton Hayes has his theory cut and dried. He has formed a vessel in
which all his work can take shape. He has written two monologues, _The
Green Eye of the Little Yellow God_, and _The Whitest Man I Know_, that
have sold more than any other similar compositions, and he wrote them
both, as it were, to scale.
“The great thing,” he said, “is to appeal to the imagination. Don’t
describe: suggest. All the best effects are got by placing the vital
incident off the stage. Let your public imagine, don’t tell them
anything; just strike chords. It’s no good describing a house; the
person will always fix the scene in some spot that he himself knows. In
as few words as possible you’ve got to recall that spot to him. He’ll do
the rest.”
About the “Green Eye” he made no pretence. He wove round it no air of
mystery and cracker tinsel.
“It took me five hours to write,” he said, “but I worked it all out
first. I don’t say it’s real poetry; but it does what I set out to do.
It appeals to the imagination. It starts off with colours, green and
yellow, that at once introduce an atmosphere. Then India: well, every
one’s got his idea of India; it’s a symbol. It conveys something very
definite to the average mind. Then play on the susceptibilities. ‘His
name was mad Karou’: you’ve got the whole man. The public will fill in
the picture for you. And then the mystery parts; just leave enough
unsaid to make paterfamilias pat himself on the back. ‘I’ve spotted it,
he can’t do me. I’m up to that dodge; I know where he went’; and when
you are at the end you come back to the point you started from. It
carries people back. You’ve got a compact whole: and you touch the sense
of pathos, ‘A broken-hearted woman tends the grave of mad Karou.’
They’ll weave a whole story round that woman’s life. Every man’s a
novelist at heart. We all tell ourselves stories. And that’s what you’ve
got to play on.”
And that is where, I think, Milton Hayes’s greatness really lies. He
thoroughly understands his audience; he can change places with each
individual that is listening to him. He never has to try a thing on some
one first to see whether it will go. He knows at once what will get over
and what will not. One of the most amusing sketches he has done was a
burlesque of a war-lecture made by a famous London journalist. He
mimicked his subject completely, but where the real “punch” lay was in
his analysis of the emotions of each individual and couple leaving the
hall. He knew exactly what each one would make of it.
One of his chief maxims, too, is that an actor must remember that he is
performing not to individuals but to couples.
“People don’t go to shows by themselves,” he said, “and you must
remember that a thing that may sound silly to a man when he’s by himself
sounds very different when he’s with his best girl. You’ve got to get
that moment when a boy wants to squeeze the hand of the girl he’s
sitting next, and the old married couple simper a bit, and think that
after all they’ve not had such a bad time together.
“And I dare say that is why a play like _Romance_ seems so bad to the
critic. He’s gone there by himself, when he should have gone there with
a girl. _Romance_ has got all the sure hits; it’s steeped in amber
light. All the effects, the hidden singer, the one passion, the woman
that never marries. But you must not go to a show like that by
yourself.”
What others have done unconsciously, Milton Hayes has done consciously.
He knows exactly what he is doing, and in consequence relies less on
chance than others of his profession, and if, as he promises, he takes
to writing musical comedies after the war, there should be very little
doubt of his success.
* * * * *
The week at Karlsruhe passed very quickly, and very pleasantly, and I
was thoroughly sorry to have to leave, especially as Tarrant and Stone
were on the permanent Red Cross staff. The prospect of a new camp at
Mainz offered hardly any attractions. There would be nothing there; no
library, no sports outfits; we should have all the trouble of starting
the machinery of a “lager.” Not one of us looked forward to it.