Crimp - Martin Crimp, Plays 3

Its the 1950s the decade I was born and Roland Barthes pictures the Writer on Holiday with the maximum affection and contempt. The Writer is in his blue pyjamas travelling forgive me I dont have the book in front of me but travelling, I believe, along the Nile or is it the Congo river dressed in his blue pyjamas but still writing since the Writer, says Barthes, is unable not to write every moment, says Barthes, for the Writer is a moment of writing writing cant stop even on holiday, says Barthes, the Writer, dressed in his blue pyjamas, or wearing his holiday hat, will write and write, will correct proofs, will imagine new forms for fiction and invent new kinds of theatre that the theatre world is so evidently agog for. How slyly claims Barthes has the Writer with the collusion of the bourgeois press adopted this relatively new-made proletarian institution, the holiday, and turned it to his advantage. Watch him toss his tanning lotion and ridiculous shorts into his holiday holdall just like the rest of us! See how even the author of The Phenomenology of the Ego staggers out of the freezing Atlantic like an ordinary human being and offers to the camera the same brave human grin and emerging from the kind of trunks the French call cock-squeezers his slightly disappointing thighs. But this claims Roland Barthes back in the 1950s is the trick of it. Since the Writer allows himself and yes its always a man allows himself to appear ordinary to like pretty girls and if Im remembering Barthes correctly certain kinds of cheese only to prove to the world how extra-ordinary he is, given he combines his taste for cheese et cetera, girls and so on, with non-stop literary production.

Barthes invokes at least I think this is true I need to check but I think he goes on to invoke the lives of saints, whose banal human origins serve to set off their amazing deaths and miracles like jewels. The Writer concludes Barthes is in fact saying: The fact that I rent for some weeks of the summer a small cottage by the sea and can be glimpsed through the hibiscus sitting outside at the breakfast table barefoot wearing blue pyjamas and drinking perfectly ordinary coffee out of a cracked rented cup EVEN AS I GO ON WRITING is none other than proof of my divinity. And yes its true I do feel pretty divine this morning yes I do feel a bit like god a little ashamed, as I look back over them, of some of the things Ive made but often proud less interested than I used to be in girls and cheese but still looking forward to my holidays. MC, June 2015