—PART TWO—
IV. Ballet as interlude in Satan the Waster
We will now turn our attention back to the rhetorical system of Lee’s text. Lee’s introduction to the 1920 trilogy Satan the Waster gives the writer space, in retrospect, to justify the Ballet’s first incarnation as a monograph. Lee’s agenda in the Ballet and in Satan the Waster changed as the war progressed, complicated, and killed. The kind of performance that The Ballet of the Nations performs changes in its move from its setting as a monograph to its setting within Satan the Waster. The ballet in 1920 feels like a climactic sequence inside growing, materialising views of such travesties as the sinking of the
177 Paul Fussell. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 199.
178 Quoted in My country is the whole world: an anthology of women's work on peace and war. Cambridge Women's Peace Collective London: Pandora Press, 1984, p. 110.
Lusitania. The ballet is still in focus, but its definition as such becomes more and more self- aware in context.
The ballet’s new context also extends the exposition and the aftermath of the Ballet, promoting a more severe sense of the Ballet’s never-ending, cyclical nature. In the new prologue to the Ballet, Satan assumes a religious grandeur, shouting from his pulpit: “Dearly beloved Nations, called heretofore Brethren in Christ, and henceforth to become true Brethren in Satan [….], [Y]e are going forth [….] to join Death’s Dance even as candid high-hearted virgins who have been decoyed by fair show into the house of prostitution….”179 After his protracted dialogue with Clio, Muse of History, Satan’s ballet becomes ever more deeply buried within the tangle of rhetoric. Perhaps even more than in Huxley’s case, the role of ballet as a formal enterprise is more rhetorically loaded in Ballet of the Nations.
When the ballet was again published in 1920 as the centrepiece of a polemical trilogy in Satan the Waster, Lee provided her reflective opinions of the original, confessing in her Introduction that the ballet’s “crude emblematic improvisation at first satisfied my need for expression”.180 Referring to the ballet as a “nucleus”, Lee explains that “a European war was going on which, from my point of view, was all about nothing at all; gigantically cruel, but at the same time needless and senseless like some ghastly ‘Grand Guignol’ performance”.181 She goes on to justify its new home inside the larger work, while at the same time seeming satisfied with—though only obliquely referring to—the balletic notion.
In Satan the Waster, the ballet interlude is prefaced by Satan himself, speaking to the Muse of History: “I need scarcely remind you that the real preparation for this new ballet of mine began long ages back; one might say with the first wars which, making men 179 Vernon Lee. Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy With Notes & Introduction. New York: John Lane Company, 1920, p. 45.
180 Ibid., p. vii.
181 Ibid. “Grand Guignol” refers to Paris’s Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (1897-1962), which “achieved a legendary reputation as the 'Theatre of Horror,' a venue displaying such explicit violence and blood-curdling terror that a resident doctor was employed to treat the numerous spectators who fainted each night.” Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson. Grand-Guignol: the French theatre of
horror. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002, (abstract).
afraid, taught them to bring on aggression by their precautions for self-defence”.182 In that statement, Lee establishes a sense of inevitability for the Ballet as an outcome of past wars and an expression for those yet to unfold. For the fictive creator of the production, as for Lee herself, the ballet is a natural vessel for the portrayal of wartime violence. There is little else explicitly said to justify the choice of medium: instead, it is expressed as an artistic given. “[T]he necessary pretexts and arguments for hatred”, continues Satan, “have, like the painted scenery of an earthly playhouse, accumulated on my hands from age to age, ready to shift from side to side”. The ballet is a collection of Satan’s observations of men under his control: he has seen (again, as Lee herself has seen) a continual “dance” of disaster that unifies the human race through the ages. As he concludes: “Thus in the coming ballet you will recognize, not without amusement, the selfsame insults against Britain’s whilom183 comrades in arms which Burke and Pitt had used against Britain’s present-day allies, the once frog-eating, systematic murderers called French”.184 This parallel is offered, perhaps, as a tongue-in-cheek apology for the ensuing behaviour of the dancing Nations: there is an historical precedent, after all.
Lee was acutely aware of pro-war (or at least hesitantly supportive) readers of her ballet who objected to her portrait. She writes to herself on their behalf: “…And you, in this shallow satire of yours, represent […] this trial of strength between Justice and Injustice, as a mere collective world-cataclysm […] you dare to represent it as a mere involuntary, aimless, senseless dance of Death…”185 When Lee impersonates her critics, she summons up some of the negativity directed in part, perhaps, to readers’ inability to understand the form of the ballet and its relationship to its volatile subject. Lee’s friend Helen Swanwick wrote to her: “Some weeks ago your publisher was so good as to send me Satan the Waster and I read it slowly and meditatively and recalled how you used to read the Ballet during those awful years and how few people understood the bitter and tragic meaning of your 182 Satan the Waster, p. 7. Further citations from this book are marked with STW and page number. The text can be accessed at https://openlibrary.org/books/OL22938518M/Satan_the_waster.
183 An obsolete or dated form of “once upon a time”.
184 Probably the Irish statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and William Pitt the Younger (1759- 1806), Britain’s youngest Prime Minister who ruled during the French Revolution. STW, p. 7. 185 Ibid, xvi.
satire”.186 Lee never provided rules for reading her Ballet, but both she and her critics call it a satire.187
At the end of the ballet section, Lee inserts an Author’s Note for Stage Managers (other than Satan):
In the event of this play being performed, it is the author’s imperative wish that no attempt be made at showing the Dancing of the Nations. The stage upon the stage must be turned in such a manner that nothing beyond the footlights, the Orchestra and the auditorium shall be visible to the real spectators, only the changing illumination which accompanies the Ballet making its performance apparent.188
If the work only hypothetically leads to actualised dance, the role of dance in this work is consequently symbolic. If the Nations were to actually dance, or if there were audible music, Lee urges that the result “would necessarily be hideous, besides drowning or interrupting the dialogue”.189 That is the extent of Lee’s practical instruction: among the seventy pages of “Notes to the Ballet” that close the volume, only rhetoric of moral philosophies for the characters and their situation is offered. In fact, The Ballet of the Nations was performed only vocally, and only once: Vernon Lee recited the Ballet herself for an audience of the Union of Democratic Control and at the Margaret Morris theatre in London.190 It remains a self-sufficient performance, with its own built-in systems of impresarios, lessees, participants, and spectators. Lee herself, in her extensive paratexts, even becomes her own critic.
In Satan the Waster’s lengthy dialogue between Satan and the Muse, Clio, Lee sets up the reasoning behind the ballet and implements a sense of a countdown to the curtain (“half an hour to go”, etc.).Describing the Ballet to Clio, Satan explains,
...one of its main themes, its Leit-motivs, as Wagnerians say, is my dealing with [virtue]: the sweet and ardent loyalty of noble lads, ready to die themselves and kill other noble lads, lest dear comrades should have died in vain…191
186 Helen Swanwick to Lee (quoted in Beer p. 122).
187 In addition to ‘ballet’, Lee calls it an “allegorical mise-en-scene” and a “War-Play”.
188 STW, p. 57. 189 Ibid.
190 According to Grace Brockington in the notes to her article, p. 158. 191 STW, p. 12.
By branding murder as virtuous, Lee reinforces the logic of its ironical new forum in the Ballet. Embedded as an interlude and the object of focus, Lee’s Ballet in the larger book acquires yet another distinction. In 1920, it is a ballet in retrospect, written not to articulate the author’s pacifism, but reappearing in order to uphold it. Lee refers to Satan the Waster as one of her “philosophical books”.192 At the time of its publication, Lee found herself reconciling the ballet’s original independence with its new location, embedded in the drama. She reflects on the Ballet: “It was in its origin merely such an extemporized shadow-play as a throng of passionate thoughts may cast up into the lucid spaces of one’s mind”. In retrospect, Lee recognises her ballet’s ‘passionate’ nature, suggesting a kind of cathartic purpose.