And just here came one of those coincidences which are always being popped into plays and stories. In another room, the telephone rang. A maid appeared at the door.
“Will you speak to Miss Gordon?” she said.
II
HELENA IN NEW YORK
The New Haven Register, after commenting on the “superb piece of staging done by Jed Harris, and the quite indescribable beauty and magic of Lillian Gish’s performance as Helena,” spoke of “Uncle Vanya” as “surely one of the few really great plays in existence ... a richly polyphonic drama, in which one watches the drift and flow of human life as one listens to the different voices in a Bach fugue.”
True enough, though “Uncle Vanya” is hardly a play at all, but a succession of incidents with no more plot than a picture, which is precisely what it is—a tapestry of exquisite workmanship, a cartoon of human futility—in this case, on a Russian farm.
Mark Twain once wrote:
“God, who could have made every one of His children happy ... yet never made a single happy one.”
Chekhov might have taken that as a text for any of his plays. In “Vanya,” no one of the characters is even passably happy, except Marina, the nurse, and Marina’s happiness lies in strong tea and hope in the hereafter. All the rest are actively unhappy, especially Vanya himself, who is hopelessly in love with Helena, wife of a querulous egotist twice her age—Helena being a little in love with “the Doctor,” who is drinking too much, himself heedless of the love of Sonia, who is too good for him, and breaking her heart for him, and is about the unhappiest of all. The late R. K. Munkittrick, of Puck, had a poem beginning: “All the house is full of sorrow, all the house is full of gloom”; the rest of it will not bear quotation, but in its entirety, it would make a typical Chekhovian chant. Chekhov’s houses all were full of sorrow—the pathetic gloom of thwarted human ambitions and desires, of blasted human ideals. Like any of us who happens to think about it, Chekhov did not at all know whether life was a tragedy or a comedy, so he called his plays comedies, and laughed them off on us, letting the tragedy take care of itself, and sink in, and add itself to our own, to make certain that we had our share. And in doing this, he created pictures of which, as the Register remarked, “one is forever thinking: ‘These things cannot have been written, they must have been lived.’” With the possible exception of “The Cherry Orchard,” “Uncle Vanya” is, I should think, the choicest of Chekhov’s tapestries, and the part of Helena, the subtlest example of his artistry.
Certainly, no rôle could have been better suited to Lillian. Helena’s beauty, her elusive, eerie personality, her mild, impersonal attitude toward much of what went on about her—it was as if the part had been created for her, or she for the part. It is the advent of Helena, and her gouty, insufferable husband, Serebrakoff, that is the catastrophe of the play—a calamity, in Astroff’s phrase, as definite as the ruin wrought by a herd of elephants—and misses being complete only because Vanya’s attempt to shoot Serebrakoff hurries them away. There is no special reason why sympathy should be with Helena, except that she is beautiful, and indifferent, and only passively to blame for the trouble she causes, and for the fact that she is bound for life to the bewhiskered Serebrakoff. Perhaps that is enough; perhaps the fact that Lillian played the part had something to do with it. The scene between the two, which opens the second act, is one of the high spots in the play. The contrast between Lillian in a canary-colored dressing-gown, her splendid hair loose, and her trumpery husband, reveals an entire epic, as tragical as any in the human story; and wherever the blame may lie interests the audience not at all, the chief desire being that the whining old human disaster may pass away as promptly as possible—overnight—leaving the lovely Helena and the doctor, or somebody, to live happy ever after.