FIVE QUESTIONS FOR ... Barry Humphries

AKA DAME EDNA EVERAGE, IN MEMORIAM

(Above: Portrait of Barry Humphries by David Hockney.)

More than a decade ago I interviewed Barry Humphries for The Daily Beast along with Michael Feinstein with whom he was appearing as his alter-ego Dame Edna. The setup was that they had booked the same theatre on Broadway - then the Henry Miller, now the Stephen Sondheim - for their one-person shows. It was a breezy 90 minute pastiche of American standards and Australian badinage backed up by an onstage band even brassier than Edna herself. Here is an excerpt - the Humphries half - from the morning I met them downstairs in the bowels of the Henry Miller - a phrase that Dame Edna would have had a marvelous time naughtily noting, then notating.

Rest in peace, brilliant man. You brought a lot of joy into the world.

(Above: Dame Edna from The Canberra Times. )

QUESTION ONE

Barry, you began your artistic endeavors as a young man Down Under as a Dadaist, and now almost 60 years later you are sharing a stage with Michael Feinstein on Broadway. That's quite an artistic arc. Judge Judy married Michael and his husband - a rather Dadaist statement in itself. Are there any similarities between Judge Judy and Dame Edna?

BARRY HUMPHRIES

Yet there is a kind of logic to it, isn’t there - my being a Dadaist to doing this Broadway show. Most radicals end up archconservatives though I don’t consider working with Michael conservative. In a sense it’s rather adventurous. We are totally different in what we do and yet we both have a crowd-pleasing act. We also—more than many people we know in this business—love what we do. I guess there is less a Dadaist flavor to the show we’ve worked out than a piquant one. …

As for Judge Judy and Dame Edna, [people respect those who speak their minds] no matter the political correctness of it. That is now getting to be more and more unusual. I do believe there is one other similarity between Edna and Judge Judy in that Edna is quite possibly Jewish herself. Judge Judy is rather proud to be Jewish. Edna hopes to be. She does remember making manicure appointments when she was 5 and overcooking chicken when she was even younger than that. So there were certain early signs of her Jewishness. But you see in Australia one can shake any family tree and one doesn't know what might fall out. We don't have ancestors in Australia. We are either descendants of convicts or tourists.

QUESTION TWO

You've played many roles, Barry, other than Dame Edna. Rupert Murdoch, for instance. Since you share an Australian heritage, are you and Rupert friendly?

I did play him in a film about the forged Hitler diaries. [The 1991 ITV miniseries, Selling Hitler] Murdoch fell for that. He's an old friend from Melbourne. I'm an even closer friend of his 101-year-old mother. [She died in 2012, two years after this interview.] She's incredible. It does help, you know, if I am talking to anyone on the New York Post or The Wall Street Journal and I sense they are getting their knives sharpened, I just have to casually mention “The Mother.” I adore her. She's a matriarch. She's gorgeous. Still quite alert. Writes all her thank you letters in ink. Like Prince Charles.

QUESTION THREE

You are a bibliophile, Barry, with a vast library, a vast collection of books. You even have, I have read, first editions by Herbert Read who was a British anarchist as well as an existential poet and art critic. He was a great believer in psychoanalysis and had a theory about art being a biological phenomenon. What biological impulses have gone into creating Dame Edna?

Well, for many years I resisted the imputation that Edna was based on my own mother. I have finally crumbled. My mother passed away about 15 years ago and I have begun to see more and more resemblances to her. She is, I dare say now, almost the reincarnation of my mother. My mother, I think, was a frustrated artist of some kind who finally was, in fact, a Melbourne housewife with no other aspiration. A lot of the inferences, of course, converge in Edna. She was at first conceived as a sort of satire on suburban smugness but gradually became more sympathetic. Now, whether Edna is a sympathetic character or not is not for me to judge. But she can say rather sharp things to people and they seem to take them well.

She says things I presume that Barry wouldn’t say.

Wouldn't dream of saying. They wouldn't cross my mind.

(Above: A Queen and a Dame.)

QUESTION FOUR

You’d make a great Oscar Wilde - better than your Rupert Murdoch. Do you have any Oscar Wilde books in your collection?

I do. In fact, I have his telephone book. It's hard to believe that the phone existed in the time of Oscar Wilde. But it did. It's a book of the telephone numbers he used. Not that many sadly. There's one for George Bernard Shaw. W.B. Yeats. But not that many.

QUESTION FIVE

You have first editions of E.M. Forster in your collection. He famously wrote in Howard’s End: “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.” That is often shortened to “only connect.” I think everything connects if one is mindful enough. You are connected to your love of books and language by your love of your wife, Lizzie, who is the daughter of poet Stephen Spender. Do you have a favorite Spender poem?

There's a great later one called "Worldsworth." You would have liked Spender, Kevin. He was very funny but that doesn't really come across in the poems. He quite liked Edna. Loved coming to her shows. You do know that I Am a Camera is really about him. Chris Isherwood was writing about Stephen. So many people think Isherwood himself was the English tutor in the story. But it was Stephen. Everything really does link up in an interesting way, doesn't it?

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Editor’s Note: I found the poem “Worldsworth” listed on page 363 in the Table of Contents for Spender’s New Collected Poems, revised and updated and published in 2005 by Faber & Faber in England. I am off to Shakespeare and Company here in Paris to try and find a copy of a collection of his poems to include it here, if I find it. But in the meantime, here is a poem by Barry’s father-in-law in memory of Humphries and Everage today.

(Above: The chapbook of poems by other poets honoring Stephen Spender that was published and edited by Humphries in an edition of only 150 copies - with a cover portrait of Spender by Hockney)

Auden's Funeral

BY STEPHEN SPENDER

                                          I

One among friends who stood above your grave

I cast a clod of earth from those heaped there

Down on the great brass-handled coffin lid.

It rattled on the oak like a door knocker

And at that sound I saw your face beneath

Wedged in an oblong shadow under ground.

Flesh creased, eyes shut, jaw jutting

And on the mouth a grin: triumph of one

Who has escaped from life-long colleagues roaring

For him to join their throng. He's still half with us

Conniving slyly, yet he knows he's gone

Into that cellar where they'll never find him,

Happy to be alone, his last work done,

Word freed from world, into a different wood.

                                         II

But we, with feet on grass, feeling the wind

Whip blood up in our cheeks, walk back along

The hillside road we earlier climbed today

Following the hearse and tinkling village band.

The white October sun circles Kirchstetten

With colours of chrysanthemums in gardens,

And bronze and golden under wiry boughs,

A few last apples gleam like jewels.

Back in the village inn, we sit on benches

For the last toast to you, the honoured ghost

Whose absence now becomes incarnate in us.

Tasting the meats, we imitate your voice

Speaking in flat benign objective tones

The night before you died. In the packed hall

You are your words. Your listeners see

Written on your face the poems they hear

Like letters carved in a tree's bark

The sight and sound of solitudes endured.

And looking down on them, you see

Your image echoed in their eyes

Enchanted by your language to be theirs.

And then, your last word said, halloing hands

Hold up above their heads your farewell bow.

Then many stomp the platform, entreating

Each for his horde, your still warm signing hand.

But you have hidden away in your hotel

And locked the door and lain down on the bed

And fallen from their praise, dead on the floor.

                                         III

(Ghost of a ghost, of you when young, you waken

In me my ghost when young, us both at Oxford.

You, the tow-haired undergraduate

With jaunty liftings of the head.

Angular forward stride, cross-questioning glance,

A Buster Keaton-faced pale gravitas.

Saying aloud your poems whose letters bit

Ink-deep into my fingers when I set

Them up upon my five-pound printing press:

'An evening like a coloured photograph

A music stultified across the water

The heel upon the finishing blade of grass.')

                                         IV

Back to your room still growing memories –

Handwriting, bottles half-drunk, and us – drunk –

Chester, in prayers, still prayed for your 'dear C.',

Hunched as Rigoletto, spluttering

Ecstatic sobs, already slanted

Down towards you, his ten-months-hence

Grave in Athens – remembers

Opera, your camped-on heaven, odourless

Resurrection of your bodies singing

Passionate duets whose chords resolve

Your rows in harmonies. Remembers

Some tragi-jesting wish of yours and puts

'Siegfried's Funeral March' on the machine.

Wagner who drives out every thought but tears –

Down-crashing drums and cymbals cataclysmic

End-of-world brass exalt on drunken waves

The poet's corpse borne on a bier beyond

The foundering finalities, his world,

To that Valhalla where the imaginings

Of the dead makers are their lives.

The dreamer sleeps forever with the dreamed.