A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause Read online

  Copyright © 2017 Shawn Wen

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wen, Shawn, author.

  Title: A twenty minute silence followed by applause / Shawn Wen.

  Description: First edition. | Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016059115 | ISBN 9781946448019 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Marceau, Marcel. | Mimes--France--Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / Miming.

  Classification: LCC PN1986.M3 W46 2017 | DDC 792.3/092--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059115

  Interior and exterior design by Kristen Radtke.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  For and

  Also, always, of course: Chandler, Joe, Stephanie, and Talia

  Why this black box? The bare stage? Why perform in a darkened, scraped-out spot?

  The mime whirls his arms in the air. His gestures leave a trail: the awning, the veranda, the colonnade. A ghosted landscape rises up wherever his fingers point.

  Before there was a thing, there was nothing. Earth was formless and empty. Such was the base. God created the world in dark space. The matter that we touch, see, and feel—the architecture and the moss—those were the remnants.

  No matter how hard we try, things that exist will never outnumber things that do not exist.

  CONTENTS

  YOUNG MARCEAU

  MANGEL

  PEDAGOGY

  BIP IS BORN

  SCENE 1: BIP, THE SOLDIER

  GENEALOGY

  SCENE 2: BIP, GREAT STAR OF THE TRAVELING CIRCUS

  M. ON SPEECH

  M. ON MARCEAU

  SCENE 3: BIP AT A SOCIETY PARTY

  COLLECTIONS: WORK-RELATED READING

  M. ON AMERICA, 1955

  SCENE 4: BIP PLAYS DAVID AND GOLIATH

  M. ON THE CONNECTIVE TISSUES

  M. ON HIS OWN

  SCENE 5: BIP ATTEMPTS SUICIDE

  M. ON BOUNDARIES AND BORDERLINES

  SCENE 6: BIP, THE BULLFIGHTER

  M. ON MAN’S MODERN PROBLEMS

  M. ON CHAPLIN

  SCENE 7: BIP AS SKATER AND SPECTATOR

  M. ON CHAPLIN II

  COLLECTIONS: READING FOR A WELL-ROUNDED EDUCATION

  SCENE 8

  SCENE 9

  SCENE 10

  M. INTERACTS WITH THE PRESS

  M. ON MASTERING ONE’S FEELINGS

  COLLECTIONS: ITEMS FROM JAPAN

  COLLECTIONS: KNIVES

  COLLECTIONS: MISCELLANEOUS

  COLLECTIONS: ICONS

  PIERRE VERRY

  M. ON FAILURE

  M. ON TECHNOLOGY

  BIP AS SLEEK CREATURE OF THE DEEP

  SCENE 11

  COLLECTIONS: MASKS

  COLLECTIONS: ZOOMORPH

  M. ON VIDEO

  SCENE 12

  CAMILLE ON MARCEAU

  COLLECTIONS: ANCIENT DOLLS

  COLLECTIONS: PAINTINGS

  M. VERSUS M.

  COLLECTIONS: JAPANESE DOLLS

  SCENE 13

  AN INTERVIEW

  SCENE 14

  A TWENTY MINUTE SILENCE FOLLOWED BY APPLAUSE

  OTHER WORKS

  CLIVE BARNES ON MATERIALISM

  SCENE 15

  M. WRITES ABOUT M.

  BIP THE STOIC

  SCENE 16

  COLLECTIONS: CLOCKS

  M. ON MOST MIMES

  COLLECTIONS: PERFORMING DOLLS

  COLLECTIONS: SACRED DOLLS

  M. ON THE KING OF POP

  M. ON THERIESENSTADT

  FROM MARCEL AND ME: A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LUST, AND ILLUSION

  COLLECTIONS: THE FURNITURE

  COLLECTIONS: THE BOXES

  CRITICS ON AGING

  SCENE 17: BIP HUNTING BUTTERFLIES

  BIP GETS LEFT BEHIND

  M. ON AGING

  PÈRE LACHAISE CEMETERY

  COLLECTIONS: PLEASURE READING

  COLLECTIONS: SILVERWARE

  COLLECTIONS: ROMAN TABLEWARE FROM THE SECOND CENTURY

  AFTER M.

  M. ON TRUTH

  SCENE 18

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  YOUNG MARCEAU

  September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Then France entered the war and the people of Strasbourg were told they had two hours to pack sixty pounds of belongings each. Marcel was sixteen. He and his brother Alain were among the first to flee.

  His brother emerged as a leader of the Underground in Limoges. Marcel became a forger. With red crayons and black ink, he shaved years off the lives of French children, too young now to be sent to concentration camps. He dressed them up as boy scouts and campers and held their hands as they went high into the Alps. Over the mountain and through the woods, out of occupied France and into Switzerland.

  His brother’s name appeared on a wanted list tacked to the wall of Gestapo headquarters.

  Marcel Mangel left Limoges for Paris and changed his name.

  he imitated everything though

  it wasn’t imitation

  it was play, wasn’t play

  he was a bird, the shape

  of plants and trees

  spoke silence, the language of fish

  the body is boneless, loose

  like elastic, the form

  of anything that vibrates or throbs

  MANGEL

  His father was a Jew, a butcher, a communist.

  The name was Mangel, meaning “lack” or “deficiency.”

  His father went to Auschwitz, the body

  taken to the crematorium

  before his identity was recorded in the log.

  Marcel Marceau preferred not to reveal his given name. He thought that “Mangel” was too common in France. Too many people came forward claiming to be relations.

  He borrowed “Marceau” from a general in Napoléon’s army.

  “Everyone in the Underground changed his name. You had to in order to survive.”

  PEDAGOGY

  After the war, Marceau joined Charles Dullin’s School of Dramatic Art, in Paris, intent on becoming an actor.

  “We were alone on stage, making funny movements and not speaking.”

  Teachers at Dullin’s school had a dream. They wanted to create a new poetics of theater to supplant the decadence and mediocrity. In early twentieth-century Paris, stage actors focused entirely on their voices and facial expressions. Their bodies were inexpressive anchors. Then, a writer named Jacques Copeau, who at thirty-three had never set foot on a stage, envisioned a renewal: Actors who were also playwrights. Actors who performed without words on a bare stage. The body was their text.

  Étienne Decroux: intellectual, theoretician, teacher, actor. As a young anarchist, he enrolled in performing arts school to study political oratory. But his path was diverted, and soon he brought all his dogmatism and verbosity to mime. Decroux sneered at bumbling pantomimes who flailed about onstage. “That play of face and hands which seemed to try to explain things but lacked the needed words. I detested this form.” His wordless theater stepped over hapless romantics and their flower-seller girlfriends. Decroux wanted to train and isolate the body. To shift gravity, challenge balance, create a physics of compensation. He called this corporeal mime. “Art should
be serious after all.”

  Leave speech behind. The body has its own language: weight, resistance, hesitation, surprise. Decroux was so obsessed with the purity of his new art that for years he taught and performed completely nude. He took to wearing loincloths only when he realized that his audience was distracted. Marceau later said of his teacher, “The work was very beautiful, but abstract, not unlike the Cubists.”

  Decroux met Marceau, taught Marceau, and proclaimed the young actor a natural mime.

  The critic Walter Kerr later wrote of Decroux, “It is the teacher’s fate never to be incomparable himself; he frees talent to go where he cannot go.”

  Of course, Marceau was not a Cubist. His work was far from abstract. He created the beloved Bip. He kissed the hand of Charlie Chaplin for birthing the Little Tramp. He thanked Charles Dickens for his Pip. But when historians and critics whispered Pierrot, Pierrot, Marceau responded, “Pierrot was a French figure; Bip is a citizen of the world.”

  BIP IS BORN

  It’s 1947. Two years after the war, we meet the fool.

  “My eyebrows are too close together, which can give a hard look to the face. To seem more naïve, I drew false eyebrows very high, about two or three centimeters above . . .”

  Bip in the subway

  Bip the street musician

  Bip as a china salesman

  Bip takes an ocean voyage

  Bip as a lion tamer

  Bip hunts butterflies

  Bip as the botany professor

  Bip at the dance hall

  Bip as the tailor in love

  Bip makes dynamite

  Bip the big game hunter

  Bip goes to an audition

  Bip at the restaurant

  Bip dreams he is Don Juan

  Bip as a babysitter

  Bip looks for a job on New Year’s Eve

  Bip goes to the moon

  Bip and the bumblebee

  Bip as a fireman

  Bip has a sore finger

  SCENE 1: BIP, THE SOLDIER

  The first helmet is too small, resting squarely on top of his head. The second helmet is much too big, and it falls over his face. The last one balances perfectly. He ties it underneath his chin, then struggles to fit himself into a tiny waistcoat. He misaligns the buttons of a long jacket and painstakingly refastens them. Bip preparing for basic training is identical to Bip primping for a gala. The same movements, the same romantic music. A new surrounding narrative.

  Bip takes a large gulp of water from his canteen. Missiles soar overhead. He shares water with a soldier to his left. The explosions get louder. He ducks down and covers his head. After this round of bombing stops, he tries to put his arm around the comrade for comfort, but he grasps only air. As he feels for his friend, his hand lowers to the ground, finally resting just a few inches above the stage floor, as if touching the back of a corpse. He pulls the soldier up on his lap and rests his head against the man’s chest, listening for a heartbeat.

  GENEALOGY

  Before there was Bip, there was Pedrolino, a stock character in the commedia dell’arte, the youngest son of the Italian performance family. He who slept in the straw with animals, sharing the dogs’ half-starved lives.

  Molière painted Pedrolino white and taught him French. He was reborn as Pierrot. Jean-Gaspard Deburau turned Pierrot into a mute.

  Jean-Louis Barrault resurrected Pierrot in Marcel Carné’s film classic, Les Enfants du Paradis, the movie referred to as France’s answer to Gone with the Wind.

  Four men vie for the love of a beautiful courtesan Garance, the movie’s proxy for commedia’s Columbina. But the man whose love is purest, the man who suffers most in pursuit, is the white-faced mime. A Pierrot, a Pierrot, here named “Baptiste Deburau.”

  Barrault himself appeared in Les Enfants du Paradis. He was the sad-faced clown dressed in white. The trusting fool, butt of pranks. Naïve, moonstruck dreamer. Ultimately, Columbina broke his heart and ran away with Harlequin, friend and rival and, later, Marceau’s first role in a play called Baptiste.

  When journalists asked about Bip, the trusting fool, butt of pranks, Marceau dismissed Bip’s European ancestors. He credited the American silent film stars: Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy.

  At least one person saw through it. Theater critic Edward Thorpe wrote in The London Evening Standard, “I must confess to never having liked Bip anyway. Despite the debt to Chaplin, the character is close to Pierrot and the winsome whimsical commedia dell’arte crew, with his affected walks, limp-wristed manner, silly hats and bizarre costumes that look like a cross between little Lord Fauntleroy and an eighteenth-century sailor.”

  (A nod to those who came before him? Marceau named his first child, a son, Baptiste.)

  SCENE 2: BIP, GREAT STAR OF THE TRAVELING CIRCUS

  Knife throwing is a feat of precision. How can we gauge our virtuoso’s aim when both the woman and the knives are invisible? Marceau trains our ears. He taps the stage floor with his ballet flat, creating an audible thud for each knife that successfully misses the woman and hits the board. We start with a symphony of thuds, a quick series of successful throws. He’s an expert. But his mood darkens as the challenges mount. He turns around and holds out one hand like a compact mirror, tossing the knife over his shoulder. Again, we hear the reassuring whump of a knife on the board.

  Chin high, unmistakable look of pride on his face. He ties a blindfold around his eyes and pulls out a sword half the size of his body. He throws it with a heave. Silence. Still blindfolded, he waves to the crowd and takes a bow. He yanks out the sword and, finally, sound of her body hitting the ground. No matter. He exits stage left.

  M. ON SPEECH

  “I don’t suffer from silence. I could be two days without speaking. I wouldn’t suffer at all.”

  Marcel Marceau’s first wife divorced him in 1958. She said he would not speak to her for days on end. She called it mental cruelty. He called it rehearsal.

  His third wife Anne Sicco called mime “his only way of thinking and expressing himself.”

  But then Studs Terkel said, “Only one guy out-talked me. Marcel Marceau. I couldn’t get a word in.”

  He used his hands as he spoke.

  There used to be a rumor that he was a deaf mute. He dispelled this rumor by appearing on talk shows: Johnny Carson, Flip Wilson, Merv Griffin.

  “I’m obliged to talk. I don’t like to talk especially.”

  But Marcel Marceau had a reputation. Those who conversed with him found his conversation as entertaining as his stage performance. His English was nearly flawless.

  “I think I am not so different from other people in my private life. Except that I don’t like very much to socialize. I am rather a person who is on his own, I like to paint, I like to read, to write, and I travel so much, you know?”

  There’s a joke that Marcel Marceau released an album. The record consists of twenty minutes of silence followed by applause.

  M. ON MARCEAU

  Marceau liked to recite lines from his own reviews: “‘Marceau explains why theater exists, where it comes from, and why it will be with us for a long time.’”

  But that’s not what the critic said.

  Walter Kerr actually wrote, “Marceau really explains where the theater came from, why it is going to last for a very long time, and why we like it.”

  Kerr did not write “Marceau explains why theater exists.” That was Marceau on Marceau.

  The empty stage is a universe without laws. Up to the mime to conjure and rearrange, to make the dark space become alive with recognitions and quickenings. To him, absences can be transformed into a wall, a woman, a restaurant, a thief. The mime holds out his arms and motions that the world floats within the armspan of one man.

  SCENE 3: BIP AT A SOCIETY PARTY

  He fastens a bow tie around his neck. First one arm through the jacket, then the other. When he pulls on gloves, his fingers wriggle into place like burrowing animals. His movements are slow, famil
iar, and precise.

  At the coat check, there’s a struggle to peel off his gloves. Then his coat sleeves cling to his arms. He bends backwards and rips himself out of the jacket. He puts up his fists, ready to box.

  Friends from across the room catch his eye and he gives them a warm wave, Hello. He lingers with the last girl, raising his eyebrow suggestively, then moves through the room, schmoozing. A giant and a dwarf are in line to greet him, prompting Bip to point his gaze toward the ceiling, then the floor. Double take: Are they a couple?

  Bip commences a handshaking tour, but exhaustion creeps into his eyes. One man won’t let go of his right hand, another grabs his left hand, locking him into a straitjacketed greeting.

  Bip pours himself a drink and downs it. The pork chop on his plate behaves like a rubber ball. He saws at it back and forth, but the knife slips, shooting the meat to the floor. When no one’s watching he surreptitiously slides down in his chair, grabs it, and again cleaves away. Finally takes a bite, and plainly finds the food disgusting, though he struggles to keep a dignified expression on his face. Finally, he washes the mess down with water, stands, throws his hands out and spins.

  Spinning is part of Marceau’s visual language. It’s shorthand for a change in character, a switch in location, the end of a performance. While Bip twirls with one hand over his mouth to hold down vomit, Marceau is marking a new scene.

  Dinner’s over. Bip has recovered, accepts a cigarette. He delightedly blows smoke rings in the air and pokes his finger through them. Rests his elbow on a mantel and appears to be chatting with good friends, relaxed for the first time this evening. He accepts another drink, one more. We read his steady intoxication in arm flops, shoulders heavier with each glass, and when he gets up to leave, he’s stumbling drunk. He hangs on to invisible walls for balance. Grasps at the arms of fellow partygoers for support. Again a wrestling match with the jacket and the gloves. At last, he’s out the door, throws his head back and spins.