food for love
by Douglas Messerli
Alfred Kreymborg Lima Beans / Provincetown Playhouse,
New York, Autumn 1916
In the summer of 1914, Alfred
Kreymborg was invited to the Connecticut art colony named Silvermine, founded
by the British art critic Charles Caffin and his wife. While there, the poet
and former editor of The Glebe,
worked on his manuscript titled Mushrooms,
published in 1916, in which several of the pieces were written as prose poems
with rhythmic dialogues, an example of which I've reproduced below:
IDEALISTS
Brother Tree:
Why
do you reach and reach?
do
you dream some day to touch the sky?
Brother Stream:
Why
do you run and run?
do
you dream some day to fill the sea?
Brother Bird:
Why
do you sing and sing?
do
you dream—
Young
Man:
Why do you talk and talk and talk?
"Lima Beans," in particular, allowed Kreymborg to combine his
poetic talents with his philosophical sense of humor, without applying the
stylized poetic conceits that often appear in his poetry itself.
Kreymborg's comic gem has very little "plot." A wife, recently
married, decides to change the basic ingredient of her husband's diet, just for
variety's sake. Calling out to the passing Huckster, whom we see briefly only
twice from the window, the wife orders up some string beans instead of the
usual limas. Upon the husband's arrival home from a day at work, the two fall
into what has clearly become a pattern of domestication which, at moments,
seems almost as abusive as Helmar's descriptions of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House ("good mouse,"
"queer little dear," etc.).
But their relationship is still fresh, and they remain in love, each
kissing one another "daintily six times."
Ready for his meal, the husband declares his hunger, as she nervously
brings forth the serving bowl. His immediate disgust is quickly established, as
he throws out its contents, sputtering out his anger as if he were a
Shakespearian King having witnessed the downfall of his kingdom:
I perspire tears and blood drops
in a town or in the fields
on the sea or in a balloon,
with my pickaxe or my fiddle
just to come home
footsore, staring, doubled with
appetite
to a meal of —string beans?
Where are my limas?
.....
You would dethrone it?
You would play renegade?
You'd raise an usurper
in the person of this
elongated, cadaverous,
throat-scratching, greenish
caterpillar—
His victim collapses in horror, as the abuser hastily leaves the house.
The comic ridiculousness of this domestic spat satirizes not only the role of
any housewife who is subjected to her companion's tastes, but demolishes the
notion that there can be any experimentation in this couple's
relationship—culinary or sexual—making anyone who has lived with another being
unable to accommodate changes in his or her life uncomfortable in the way that
Henri Bergson argues comedy always does.
With what Kreymborg describes as "housewifely shrewdness," the
woman calls back the Huckster, quickly buys some lima beans, and deftly cooks
them, just in time for her husband's return to apologize.
The slightness of these themes, however, is more than made up for in the
musical phrases of the quick-paced dialogue (including the stage descriptions);
and, although I have never seen a production of this play, one can imagine the
marvelous potentialities of the actors (or, perhaps, even puppets, with whom
Kreymborg suggested it was to be cast).
Evidently, the famed human cast, poet and artist Mina Loy, poet and
doctor William Carlos Williams, and artist-designer William Zorach, easily took
up the task, reading the "score" with great gusto, Loy clearly
sensing the issues of the marriage theme, and Williams, according to Kreymborg,
"in terror lest he blow up." Williams writes that Zorach sang his
role "with zest and vehemence," looking somewhat like Harpo Marx.
Both Loy and Williams wore costumes of their own making, Loy stunningly
dressed in a green gown and one of her own hand-made broaches, which according
to Kreymborg, was "not in keeping with Mrs. Lima." The curtain
created by the Zorachs was dressed, apparently, as Kreymborg conceived it,
"painted in festoons of vegetables," and performed admirably, coming
down—since, the author admits, it cannot see and has no comprehension—in the
midst of the husband's final question, which may have been an invitation to
sex.
Los Angeles, August 15, 2010
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