Daily Blague

Ruth Draper. I shall probably always point to this page in August; over the years, Draper's monologues have taken on the weight of Hamlet's. They're "so full of quotations!", to quote Mrs Clancy in The Italian Lesson (she's speaking of Dante, beyond the first terzet of whose "Divine!" Comedy she seems fated never to get. And if "Oh, waiter, would you kindly add to that order three chocolate eclairs" no longer puts me in danger of crise cardiaque, I remember my first response to that line as if it were a page of my medical history. (The request is made by Mrs Grimmer, in Doctors and Diets.) It's easy to take Ruth Draper's monologues as early American camp, and perhaps they are. But they're something else, something that has nothing to do with camp. They're mature American satires. Ruth Draper may have been the first intelligent person to focus on American silliness.

(What did Edith Wharton make of her? Did they ever connect?)

Gay fans kept Ruth Draper alive from the time that she died, shortly after recording a bunch of her routines at Yale in the mid-Fifties, until fairly recently, when, like so many gay crazes, she was de-cryogenized and released into the general culture, to quietly mounting acclaim. Any real fan ought to try to obtain her correspondence. It is very Yankee and sound. When her lover, an Americo-Itlalian poet almost half her age, crashed into the Mediterranean in a plane that he was flying in order to distribute anti-Fascist leaflets, she was broken-hearted but determined to carry on. The three years that they had together remained her golden age. It is immensely touching to read the letters in which she talks about it - which she does not do, you may be sure, at length. She may have been a comedienne, and a rich one, too (she earned a fortune), but her heart beat not too differently from Pagliaccio's.

"So often that's how trouble starts." Just say that to Kathleen, and her eyes will glisten at you as she decides on the right smile. And the right riposte.

Audience>This & That>Ruth Draper