In the 1920s, new sexual ideologies reshaped prescriptions for marriage, incorporating moderate versions of feminism. Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood shared the romantic radicalism of Floyd Dell and other Greenwich Village bohemians in the early 20th century. They practiced open marriage, though not without pain and confusion. Written in 1916 for the Provincetown Players, an innovative theater group that operated between 1915 and 1922, Enemies was an autobiographical meditation on the emotional struggles of a couple in a non-monogamous marriage. The characters expressed considerable bitterness, yet in the end affirmed their partnership. In the first draft of the play the characters bore the names of their authors, clearly suggesting its autobiographical inspiration.
HE: JUSTUS SHEFFIELD
SHE: IDA RAUH
SCENE: A living room
TIME: After dinner
Produced by the Authors
Setting designed by B. J. O. Nordfeldt
She is lying in a long chair, smoking a cigarette and reading a book. He is sitting at a table with a lamp at his left-manuscript pages scattered before him, pen in hand. He glances at her, turns the lamp up, turns it down, rustles his m.s.[manuscript],snorts impatiently. She continues reading.
HE: This is the limit!
SHE: (Calmly.) What is?
HE: Oh, nothing. (She turns the page, continues reading with interest.) This is an infernal lamp!
SHE: What’s the matter with the lamp?
HE: I’ve asked you a thousand times to have some order in the house, some regularity, some system! The lamps never have oil, the wicks are never cut, the chimneys are always smoked! And yet you wonder that I don’t work more! HOW can a man work without light?
SHE: (Glancing critically at lamp.) This lamp seems to me to be all right. It obviously has oil in it or it would not burn, and the chimney is not smoked. As to the wick, I trimmed it myself to-day.
HE: Ah, that accounts for it!
SHE: Well, do it yourself next time, my dear!
HE: (Irritated.) But our time is too valuable for these ever-recurring jobs! Why don’t you train Theresa, as I’ve asked you so often?
SHE: It would take all my time for a thousand years to train Theresa.
HE: Oh, I know! All you want to do is to lie in bed for breakfast, smoke cigarettes, write your high literary stuff, make love to other men, talk cleverly when you go out to dinner and never say a word to me at home! No wonder you have no time to train Theresa!
SHE: Is there anything of interest in the paper?
HE: You certainly have a nasty way of making an innocent remark!
SHE: I’m sorry. (Absorbed in her book.)
HE: No, you’re not. That last remark proves it.
SHE: (Absently.) Proves what?
HE: Proves that you are an unsocial brutal woman!
SHE: You are in a temper again.
HE: Who wouldn’t be, to live with a cold-blooded person that you have to hit with a gridiron to get a rise out of?
SHE: I wish you would read your paper quietly and let me alone.
HE: Why have you lived with me for fifteen years if you want to be let alone?
SHE: (With a sigh.) I have always hoped you would settle down.
HE: By settling down you mean cease bothering about household matters, about the children, cease wanting to be with you, cease expecting you to have any interest in me.
SHE: No, I only mean it would be nice to have a peaceful evening sometimes. But (laying book down) I see you want to quarrel—so what shall we quarrel about? Choose your own subject, my dear.
HE: When you’re with Hank you don’t want a peaceful evening!
SHE: Now how can you possibly know that?
HE: Oh, I’ve seen you with him and others and I know the difference. When you’re with them you’re alert and interested. You keep your unsociability for me. (Pause.) Of course, I know why.
SHE: One reason is that “they” don’t talk about lampwicks and so forth. They talk about higher things.
HE: Some people would call them lower things!
SHE: Well—more interesting things, anyway.
HE: Yes, I know you think those things more interesting than household and children and husband.
SHE: Oh, only occasionally, you know—just for a change. You like a change yourself sometimes.
HE: Yes, sometimes—But I am excited, and interested and keen whenever I am with you. It is not only cigarettes and flirtation that excite me.
SHE: Well—you are an excitable person. You get excited about nothing at all.
HE: Are Home and Wife and Children nothing at all?
SHE: There are other things. But you, Deacon, are like the skylark—
"Type of the wise who soar but do not roam
True to the kindred points of heaven and home."—
HE: You are cheaply cynical! —You ought not to insult Wordsworth. He meant what he said.
SHE: He was a good man. . . . But to get back to our original quarrel. You’re quite mistaken. I’m more social with you than with anyone else. Hank, for instance hates to talk, even more than I do. He and I spend hours together looking at the sea-each of us absorbed in our own thoughts—without saying a word. What could be more peaceful than that?
HE: (Indignantly.) I don’t believe it’s peaceful—But it must be wonderful!
SHE: It is—marvellous. I wish you were more like that. What beautiful evenings we could have together!
HE: (Bitterly.) Most of our evenings are silent enough, unless we are quarreling!
SHE: Yes, if you’re not talking, it’s because you’re sulking. You are never sweetly silent—never really quiet.
HE: That’s true—with you—I am rarely quiet with you—because you rarely express anything to me. I would be more quiet if you were less so—less expressive if you were more so.
SHE: (Pensively.) The same old quarrel. Just the same for fifteen years! And all because you are you and I am I! And I suppose it will go on forever—I shall go on being silent, and you—
HE: I suppose I shall go on talking—but it really doesn’t matter—the silence or the talk—if we had something to be silent about or to talk about—Something in common—That’s the point!
SHE: Do you really think we have nothing in common? We both like Dostoyevsky and prefer Burgundy to champagne.
HE: Our tastes and our vices are remarkably congenial, but our souls do not touch.
SHE: Our souls? Why should they? Every soul is lonely.
HE: Yes, but doesn’t want to be. The soul desires to find something into which to fuse and so lose its loneliness. This hope to lose the soul’s loneliness by union—is love. It is the essence of love as it is of religion.
SHE: Deacon, you are growing more holy every day. You will drive me to drink.
HE: (Moodily.) That will only complete the list.
SHE: Well, then I suppose we may be more congenial—for in spite of what you say, our vices haven’t exactly matched. You’re ahead of me on the drink.
HE: Yes, and you on some other things. But perhaps I can catch up too—
SHE: Perhaps—if you really give all your time to it, as you did last winter, for instance. But I doubt if I can ever equal your record in potations.
HE: (Bitterly.) I can never equal your record in the soul’s infidelities.
She: Well, do you expect my soul to be faithful when you keep hitting it with a gridiron?
HE: No, I do not expect it of you! I have about given up the hope that you will ever respond either to my ideas about household and children or about our personal relations. You seem to want as little as possible of the things that I want much. I harass you by insisting. You anger and exasperate me by retreating. We were fools not to have separated long ago.
SHE: Again! How do you repeat yourself, my dear!
HE: Yes, I am very weak. In spite of my better judgment I have loved you. But this time I mean it!
SHE: I don 't believe you do. You never mean half the things you say.
HE: I do this time. This affair of yours with Hank is on my nerves. It is real spiritual infidelity. When you are interested in him you lose all interest in the household, the children and me. It is my duty to separate.
SHE: Oh, nonsense! I didn’t separate from you when you were running after the widow last winter—spending hours with her every day, dining with her and leaving me alone, and telling me she was the only woman who had ever understood you.
HE: I didn’t run after the widow, or any other woman except you. They ran after me.
SHE: Of course! Just the same since Adam—not one of you has spirit enough to go after the apple himself! “They ran after you”—but you didn’t run away very fast, did you?
HE: Why should I, when I wanted them to take possession if they could? I think I showed splendid spirit in running after you! Not more than a dozen other men have shown the same spirit. It is true, as you say, that other women understand and sympathize with me. They all do except you. I’ve never been able to be essentially unfaithful, more’s the pity. You are abler in that regard.
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