Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Tea in Literature (Act II)

Having Tea. In literature we read marvelous dialogue staged around the tea table.

In the; Wilde play, "The Importance of Being Earnest" 1895, tea is much in evidence throughout the play. I find this very enlightening once you understand a little of the man behind the prose. (understand this in context of his "Time")

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

Celebrated playwright Oscar Wilde hid a secret far more astonishing than his homosexual lustings: he was hopelessly addicted to tea.

The literary genius openly flouted his homosexuality to deflect attention from his tea addiction. Only when he was arrested did the truth finally out.

Police stormed his house in Kensington and discovered crates of Darjeeling and Kenya tea in his basement. The living room and kitchen were said to be strewn with used tea bags and police were horrified to discover several tea bags in the freezer. In the bathroom, there were signs of a desperate struggle. Tea was splattered all over the walls and there were deep tea stains on the carpet.
At Her Majesty's leisure, Wilde had to endure inferior tea and only two times daily, one cup in the morning and one before bed. Worse still, he sunk to new depths of depravity as he dabbled with coffee and hot chocolate. He was forced to go “Cold Turkey” and spiraled into deep depression as he fought off the constant craving for tea.

Upon his release, the shamed philanderer fled to Gay Paris where he reverted to his previous tea drinking ways. The more relaxed attitude towards homosexuals and tea addicts in Paris suited Wilde’s lifestyle. During the latter years of his life he enjoyed loose Chai tea, supposedly dusted over the buttocks of naked virgins and placed into a teapot where they were infused with hot water for several minutes.

Wilde never took milk with his tea. He believed this compromised the flavour of the tea and called those who took milk with their tea “scum”.

Henrik Johan Ibsen: (1828 -1906)

Henrik Ibsen wrote his play, "Love's Comedy," (1862) .. Ibsen, is a bit of a "heavy read" .. not something you just casually pick up, but he's worth the effort .. Love's Comedy is a great read.

Extract from the Play:

FALK.
"So many heads, so many sentences!
No, you all grope and blunder off the line.
Each simile's at fault; I'll tell you mine;--
You're free to turn and wrest it as you please.
(Rises as if to make a speech.)
In the remotest east there grows a plant;
And the sun's cousin's garden is its haunt--"
THE LADIES: "Ah, it's the tea-plant!"
FALK: "Yes."
MRS. STRAWMAN.
"His voice is so
Like Strawman's when he--"
STRAWMAN.
"Don't disturb his flow."
FALK.
"It has its home in fabled lands serene;
Thousands of miles of desert lie between;--
Fill up, Lind!--So.--Now in a tea-oration,
I'll show of tea and Love the true relation.
(The guests cluster round him.)
It has its home in the romantic land;
Alas, Love's home is also in Romance,
Only the Sun's descendants understand
The herb's right cultivation and advance.
With Love it is not otherwise than so.
Blood of the Sun along the veins must flow
If Love indeed therein is to strike root, And burgeon into blossom, into fruit"

Vaclav Havel, "Letters to Olga" (his wife)

When essayist and playwright Vaclav Havel was imprisoned for his political views, he wrote to his wife constantly. In his remarkably personal and illuminating book, "Letters to Olga, June 1979-September 1982," we learn the terrors, the boredom, the day-to-day rise and fall of the spirit of the man.

What comforted him most, almost to the point of obsession, was the ritual he made in preparing tea.

It was, as he wrote Olga, a pleasure, an extravagance of a sort, something he could control in a thoroughly uncontrollable situation.

"When I was outside, I didn't understand the cult of tea that exists in prison," he writes. "...I wasn't here long before grasping its significance and succumbing to it myself...Tea, it seems to me, becomes a kind of material symbol of freedom here: It is in effect the only fare that one can prepare oneself, and thus freely: When and how I make it is entirely up to me. In the preparation of it, I realize myself as a free being, as it were, capable of looking after myself." ...I schedule (tea) carefully, so it does not become a formless and random activity..."

Louis Marie Julien Viaud (1850 - 1923) was a French sailor and writer, who used the pseudonym / nom de plume: Pierre Loti.

His novels, mostly set in exotic places visited during his career as a naval officer. In 1887 he wrote "Madame Chrysantheme" which set the fashion for stories with a Japanese setting. This story is rife with “tea" related settings. I find that his works much; miss quoted / out of context, best to read and enjoy

Excerpt from : CHAPTER LI __ THE LAST DAY

In the last glimmer of twilight, by the light of the first twinkling star, the ladies, with many charming curtsey's, make their appearance.Our house is soon full of the little crouching women, with their tiny slit eyes vaguely smiling; their beautifully dressed hair shining like polished ebony; their fragile bodies lost in the many folds of the exaggerated, wide garments, that gape as if ready to drop from their little tapering backs and reveal the exquisite napes of their little necks.Chrysantheme, with somewhat a melancholy air, and my mother-in-law,Madame Renoncule, with many affected graces busy themselves in the midst of the different groups, where ere long the miniature pipes are lighted.Soon there arises a murmuring sound of discreet laughter, expressing nothing, but having a pretty exotic ring about it, and then begins a harmony of tap! tap! tap!--sharp, rapid taps against the edges of the finely lacquered smoking-boxes. Pickled and spiced fruits are handed round on trays of quaint and varied shapes. Then transparent china teacups, no larger than half an egg-shell, make their appearance, and the ladies are offered a few drops of sugarless tea, poured out of toy kettles, or a sip of "saki"--

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