— But that's not what I…
— You follow me? Who's just been shot over a card game or killed in a duel over some drunken insult, who shot his overseer caught sleeping with his wife, the price of cotton on the docks at Beaufort, prices at a horse auction, a slave auction and whose slaves have run off like you've set up John Israel right there in your prologue? He had his finger right on the pulse of the land in those dark days, wars and rumours of war he could show up anywhere with an ear to the ground, at a place like Quantness and nobody suspecting a thing, whetting their appetites for scandal where no household's secrets were safe, even theirs. Make him a bit more believable wouldn't it? a little bit more entertaining too up against your pompous Major, even works nicely when he walks in unannounced up north there in the second act peddling cigars and runs into Bixby.
— Bagby! If you want entertainment, if that's all you want Bagby's supposed to be a…
— Bagby of course yes, sorry old sport, a marvelous character, sort of your Greek chorus isn't he. The spoiler, the new man, the spirit of unbridled capitalism with his use versus own in the old Major's lexicon, the triumphant absence of integrity up against Kane who's the lonely heart and soul of it jangling across that desolate landscape with his pots and pans, the rootless wandering Jew who…
— Now wait, wait what makes you think he's Jewish!
— Because they were, most of them, weren't they? The Jewish peddler, a regular institution, make him a Jew and you've got half your Broadway audience right in the palm of your hand, you might even pick up a Pulitzer Prize.
— The Pu, good God talk about being famous for five minutes the Pulitzer Prize is a gimcrack out of journalism school you wrap the fish in tomorrow, talk about the great unwashed it's got nothing to do with literature or great drama it's the hallmark of mediocrity and you'll never live it down, what makes you think I want to get some wheezing Broadway matinee audience in the palm of my hand with a comic Irishman and a Jewish peddler telling dirty stories who…
— I wish they wouldn't fight, can you reach that wine Teen since they're too busy to notice? And for God's sake let me do something with this revolting mess they've made of this oyster aspic, put it on the floor where we won't even have to look at it, if she's still whipping that cream out there she'll turn it to butter, shouldn't you call her?
— Not it at all old boy, try to be patient with me for a minute, not suggesting a character who parades around up there muttering oy gewalt and picking his nose am I? No reason he can't be just as intelligent, just as shrewd and cultivated as your character is right now, just as well read without this stiff sort of academic veneer, a free spirit rattling along down those country roads all day behind his mule in his cart pots and pans jangling while he reads the Aeneid and oh, incidentally, running through your deposition again you ascribe the Iliad to some Greek nobody ever heard of, can't imagine why I didn't trip you up on it.
— Some Greek? I never mentioned the Iliad, you think I'd make a mistake like…
— Talking about characters beneath contempt like Bagby?
— Nicochares, the Diliad not the Iliad, the Diliad, characters beneath our level of goodness in the Diliad.
— Your point old sport, tripped me up that time, stenographers you get these days you've got to be grateful they've even heard of the Iliad. Comes a bit closer to your Socrates parallel too doesn't he? Informal, deceptively humble, a little unkempt, touch up his dialogue a bit here and there and there's your wry argumentative Jew with his own fierce hunger for intelligent talk, for this relentless doomed pursuit of ideas out there peddling his pots and pans in this intellectual wasteland, five cents, ten cents, the counting gene again, the second half of your equation, you follow me?
— No.
— Of course you do. The whole thing's your creation isn't it? the forces struggling against each other in this terrible equation that's still there at the heart of the matter today, obviously you've read your Tocqueville? You lay out the left side of it at the start with the apparition of this black runaway slave, he doesn't even appear, we don't see him we don't have to, the invisible man somebody called him haunting the whole play, haunting your main character with that flimsy pretext from the Social Contract of compelling men to be free to be hunted down somewhere and killed with no bands of angels waiting out there wails the dried old husk of a woman who's taught him to read in the Bible, about what it amounts to isn't it?
— But you can't say a flimsy pretext no, that whole noble idea of Rousseau's that for life to be good at all it had to be good for all men, and…
— Noble idea! About all it was, that pragmatic notion of ideas as instruments for guides to action never mind, I withdraw it, he's instrumental isn't he? Get on to the right side of your deadly equation where Kane's hounding him with his merciless logic about justice, manipulating all his hollow high sounding claims to moral rectitude leading him deeper into his dilemma, your cunning old Jewish peddler blackmailing him with four thousand years of Christian guilt, he isn't simply embattled, your main character. He is the battlefield, and there's your deadly equation, the black on one side and the Jew on the other fighting it out today wherever we look, you follow me?
Backed into a corner now silhouetted against the glass giving down on the pale light glistening on the pond, hands digging distracted in the pockets at his side for whatever they might come up with, a packet of obsolete design in one of them, coming out with — no… tearing it open with the other, — no it's going too far, a play about the Civil War I don't see how we got into all this, it's not about these quarrels between black people and Jews that burst out on the front page is it? It's…
— Not about these crude street fights that bring out the worst in both of them no, it's not about Hollywood Jews backing movies to show blacks as beasts in a jungle, Jewish doctors dispensing disease to black babies, it's not even about Jewish storekeepers in Harlem using the counting gene to exploit blacks who don't have it no, that's how they'd like it isn't it, your clean white Christian middle class watching it explode on the evening news worried to death about property values when the Jews move in, then the blacks and the whole harlequin spawn of the Caribbean and there goes the neighborhood as you say. Drugs, gunfire, let them fight it out, turn off the news and go in to dinner, not our fight is it? like your wounded pheasant burrowing for refuge in the stone wall, trying to flee from what was happening? the hollow essence of this Christian hypocrisy? And the burnished silk of Sulka's tailoring leapt up against that fine old worsted gripping a wrist there, — sorry…
— No I'll get it he blurted, excused for breaking away to recover the torn cigarette packet from what little of the floor remained between them, digging one out as he straightened up if for no more than to occupy his unsteady hand only to find himself abruptly caught by a lapel backed up against the window itself.
— John Israel and Kane out there, both sides of your equation manipulating your hero's profoundly hypocritical capacity for guilt, the black and the Jew parading their very real grievances they're not appealing to his conscience, they're not even fighting each other to seize hold of his conscience Oscar they're fighting for which one will fill this yawning sentimental churchgoing flagwaving vacant remnant of the founding fathers, which one will finally be the conscience of this exhausted morally bankrupt corpse of the white Protestant establishment and that! with an emphatic stab straight to the heaving chest — that's the heart of it, the heart of the American dilemma. Sorry, didn't mean to, didn't hurt you old sport did I? Here, need a light? What's that you're smoking, never seen them.