Dependency in a Surgical Ward

IN 1971 Israel Horovitz said, "I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film--anything--unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing." Something is still troubling Horovitz because he is still a prolific writer, and one who experiments with different media. In addition to a dozen plays, he wrote the screenplay for the eminently forgettable Strawberry Statement and another less financially successful film, plus television scripts for two NET programs, including VD Blues, narrated by Dick Cavett. He is now working on a trilogy of plays; the first part called Alfred the Great, premiered two weeks ago in Pittsburgh.

Horovitz's just-published Cappella, his first novel, is a strange mixture of forms; certainly not a novel in the ordinary sense. The story weaves around two characters--one young, one old--who lie in adjacent beds in a hospital surgical ward. A copyist assigned to note everything dictated by the young man, Byron, relates the story. But the copyist makes his task a greater one and copies diligently not only what Byron says, but what he thinks, and also what his roommate, the 70-year-old Cappella, says and thinks and does. The novel is this copyist's first-person diary, complete with his own thoughts of his job--and complete of course with his own feelings, which obscure he truth about Byron and Cappella.

"I CAN'T BE concerned with a form, I can only be concerned with an issue," Horovitz once said. But instead of writing a play, Horovitz chose to write a novel this time, and this choice shows his concern with form. Horovitz again contradicts himself by centering the novel on himself rather than a social issue like fear (The Indian Wants the Bronx) or racism (Morning). Cappella is an autobiography; Byron is Israel Horovitz. Both the fictional Byron and the real Horovitz were born on March 31, both have a wife and three children, and, foremost, both are authors.

As much as the copyist obscures, he also analyzes, and his thoughts parallel the developing relationship between Byron and Cappella as they relate parts of their lives to each other. Cappella is lonely and troubled mainly because he is unwanted and superfluous. He explains a painful extramarital relationship which resulted in a daughter whose true identity he had to keep from his wife; and between sad reminiscences he screams in the night for herring or chopped liver.

Cappella is waiting to die, but at the same time to be reborn. He can not bear to be released from the hospital even when he is healed, and he consequently reopens his wound with a yellow number 2 pencil. When he sneaks out of the hospital to wander the city streets, he carries with him a tragic note:

My name is A. CAPPELLA I have nobody. If you find me dead, leave me be for ten minutes then bring me back to life

BYRON'S STORY is stranger in the traditional sense of the absurd. Once for example he was running along the beach and drawn to a mansion in which he found a dead, mutilated woman. He set about to erase her by burying her and burning her books and photos, and is relieved of his inner drive only when everything is in order.

At one time Byron sees Cappella in a dream as young; at another point Byron is made old. Their roles merge. They are really the same person--they are Israel Horovitz.

And the copyist is Israel Horovitz too. The copyist, in the final analysis, realizes that life will never end. About Byron the copyist reports: "Byron will delude himself . . . He will each time believe that it is over. That he is free." Later the copyist says: "Soon to end . . . The cast is their duet now . . . Each knows the other if forever now and both are frightened awed terrified by all that notion contains."

CAPPELLA IS ABOUT dependency. Byron and Cappella become so reliant on each other that they merge into one. Byron is submissive to the female surgeon Pauline, but their interdependence is mutually satisfying. Byron is also dependent on the copyist, who, though blind, is the final historical record of Byron's thoughts and deeds. It is as the copyist himself says, the story of slave and master.

The style of Horovitz's novel is really not far removed from his playwrighting style. The long flashbacks are very much like actors' soliloquies. His word choice is suggestive; he picks sounds out of the air and puts them into the sentences: "The daggered scoops drove heartily into each bale whoosh picked it up VZZZ carried it to the baths." He repeats words and sometimes even phrases in an effort to tie together ideas, though he is not as successful at it as Kurt Vonnegut. His connections do not possess the absurdity which enables Vonnegut to weave entirely distinct happenings into a master web.

Cappella is a shift in direction for Horovitz. His previous works have been short sketches centering around single, topical social issues. But the limitations were obvious in Acrobats, a short metaphor about the dependency between a husband and his wife. Though it contained the innovative use of actual acrobats on stage playing the roles of acrobats and interspersing gymnastics with the dialogue, Acrobats offered little of lasting value. Similarly It's Called the Sugar Plum, a comedy about a Harvard student who kills another student when he accidentally slips off his skateboard under the wheels of a moving car on Mt. Auburn St. is too limited. Sugar Plum is a character sketch using an improbable occurrence to draw out very familiar character types.

Cappella is a much more complicated, complete work through which we will be able to examine the author's life. Horovitz has said that a work needs the total enigma in order to find the ultimate hero. Cappella is an attempt at that paradox--the only trouble is that that paradox would make Horovitz the ultimate hero.

Sonnet

In times of deepest anguish, like a lover,

Old, familiar, but half-forgotten, Death

Appears before my aching soul afresh

With tender words, "Oh woman, cease to suffer.

Cease to care for what you won't attain

And would not want. In life there is no love

That will not vex, and vanish, when whims move,

And pleasure in life is merely lost in pain."

And there is no one who can comfort me

More than this lover who always comes to make

His offer. Yet I have refused each time to take

Him, stiffening from pride, or fear, or prudery,

Or perhaps I have so long remained unbending

Preferring ever the wooing to the ending. --Joan Isaacson

the words unspoken

shook the walls and rattled the window frames

a vase shattered into the silence

from a high shelf, fragments

made a fortress round their feet

luminous dials ticked orangely

in corners a moon grinned

like a cat at the window,

rolled out its tongue,

and disappeared; several stars

exploded like gunshots

in the morning sunlight, nothing

save two cold sleepers, some broken glass.   --Joan Isaacson