Self portrait (2)
FRANCIS EBEJER
I Publishing
n 1958 and 1960, MacGibbon & Kee (now Granada
Ltd.) of London published my first two
novels, both with a Malta setting: A Wreath For The
Innocents (now extant as A Wreath Of Maltese Inno-
cents Malta, Bugelli Publications, 1981); and Evil Of
The King Cockroach (extant in paperback under the
title of Wild Spell Of Summer).
In the early 1960s I turned to the stage, with my
first full-length stage-play Vaganzi Tas-Sajf (1962)
for which I was awarded first prize in the first
playwriting competition organized by the Manoel
Theatre Management Committee. After it, came
other 3-Act plays: Boulevard (1964); Menz (1967) -
(performed also in Japan, 1971); /1-lfadd Fuq /1-Bejt
(1971); L-Imwarrbin (1974) (1968, as The Cliff-
hangers); Meta Morna Tal-Melliena (1976); L-
Jmnarja Zmien /1-Qtil (1973); Vum-Barala-Zungare
(1973); Karnival (1977). Four of these plays deal with
Maltese characters and social situations in a Maltese
setting. Later, I translated into English the first four
plays mentioned above.
In the meantime, my third English novel In The
Eye Of The Sun had come out in London, in 1969
(Macdonald & Co.) - ten whole years after I had
written it, in 1959.
I was also writing for television, plays like: Hemm
Barra; Mixtieq Il-Kenn (a disaster); X'Ma Kixifx /1-
lfajt; Persuna Qiegnda Tigi Nvestigata Dwar . .. ;
Morru Sejnu Lill- Werrieta; Filjla Minn Wara lfajt
(not produced so far); lfitan and the 13-episode Id-
Dar Tas-Soru.
My TV documentary An Eye To Reckon With (L-
Gnajn Gnatxana) tied for third place with Russia's
entry at the 1971 Golden Harp International TV
Festival held in Dublin.
Also during this period, I was writing other palys
. in English: Mark Of The Zebra; Cleopatra Slept
(Badly) Here; Bloody In Bolivia; Golden Tut (also
produced in London, directed by Adrian Rendle);
Hour Of The Sun; Saluting Battery; Hefen Plus Zero
(also produced in Spain, in Britain, directed by Tom
Lishman at Coventry, and in Venice, for the 1970
Prix Itillia, where it tied for the finals with a Finnish
play and Samu-el Beckett's "Lessness" - no prize
was given as the Jury could not reach an unanimous
verdict on any of the three plays); The Cliffhangers
(soon to be produced in London, directed by Saviour
Pirotta).
My ten-year old marriage had come to grief in
1957. In 1958, I availed myself of Emigration Leave
and went off to England to try and knock some new
The author as Sarid in his TV play Is-Sejlia ta' Sarid (1969)
shape into my seriously manuled relationship~ with
my wife who had gone to live there - she is half
Maltese and half English, born and bred in England.
I returned to the Island and my job after some
months, my marriage problems unresolved, as they
remain to this day.
I have had three children: Frank, Mary Jane and,
some years later, Damian, who is well and happy and
settled in London where he has been showing signs of
literary and artistic talent. Frank was to die later in
1972 at the age of twenty-two in a road accident in
Hampshire - the one event that I truly, and deeply
regret where my marriage is concerned.
The years immediately before and after my separa-
tion from my wife are not years that I would gladly
go back to . It was in the midst of these personal crises
that my first modern plays appeared at the Manoel
Theatre. Suddenly I found myself at the receiving
end of both admirers (few) and the uncomprehending
and the plainly hostile (many).
Fortunately perhaps, and vanity aside, not so
much for me personally as for the theatre in Malta,
scholars, poets, writers and critics of the calibre of
Guze Aquilina, Mario Azzopardi, Victor Fenech, Joe
Friggieri, Oliver Friggieri, Ray Mahoney, Daniel
Massa, P. Serracino Inglott and Paul Xuereb saw the
justice of what I was trying to do in the theatre, and I
am certain that their writings on my kind of theatre
over the months, and the years even, went a long way
towards forming a new public theatre awareness as
modern tenents would have it. Personal crisis or not,
I went on badgering the Muse to abide with me.
There were considerable ups and downs, and long
periods of unmitigated loneliness; the casts them-
selves of the plays which I produced were hardly ever
aware of the mess in my current personal life .
1
I
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 On the other hand, art, I suppose, looks after its
own, and it was through the actual physical and
mental endeavours of trying to create, whether in
writing or theatre production, that I somehow pulled
through.
My fifth English novel was Requiem For A Malta
Fascist (A.C. Aquilina & Co., Malta, 1980) which
traces the hero-protagonist's history from his child-
hood in the 1920s, on to the Fascist Thirties and the
Second World War and the Axis siege of the Maltese
Islands in the 1940s. After it came Leap Of Malta
Dolphins (Vantage Press, Inc., New York, 1981)
bearing an environmental and ecological theme.
At the time of writing this article, I have another
novel as well as two plays completed. One day I feel I
must close a lacuna by writing a novel in Maltese.
Someone or other once wrote that a journey is
already completed before it is begun. Yes, that's all
very well, but what an exciting search over unknown
ground it is to try and find, if ever, the reason behind
the idea of a journey at all.
Regarding my thematic concept of time, as Schiller
wrote: "In today already walks tomorrow." This
turned out to be (I was far from being analytically
aware of it at the time) my leitmotif right from the
start. What produced it might have been my sense of
history - I was passably good at this subject in
school - wherein, just as in nature, nothing is
wasted; or, more feasibly, my way around trying to
cope with the mixed blessings of nostalgia. Yet, who
was it who pointed out that, when people talk of the
good old days, they should cut their magic recall
back by at least half for a truer approximation to
things-as-they-really-were?
This theme of the past relentlessly pursuing the
present and affecting the future - "the present is
pregnant with the future" - is apparent in a number
of my earlier plays such as Bwani; Is-Sejlia Ta' Sarid;
IZ-Zjara; Sefora; and in later ones like, Boulevard;
The Cliffhangers (L-Imwarrbin); Id-Dar Tas-Soru
and Karnival; as well as in my novels, In The Eye Of
The Sun and Leap Of Malta Dolphins.
Good times; bad times. Halcyon days, crises - in
short, we walk through life one mass of contrasts and
contradictions, old and new, which mercifully can be
transcended by the creative factor into art. Employ-
ing hindsight, and allowing it to be illuminated by
comments from critics and other scholars, I regard
my work, in both novel and play form, as quest for
that elusive nodus by which one becomes aware,
however dimly, of that meeting point of contradic-
tions - yet another paradox, inherent of action and
reaction - inside one's self as in life and, with luck,
accept it as nuclear to the complete life.
The search for truth, in other words? That is the
most subjective search of all; it simply has to be
38
personal, with all its shades and variations, this side
of the Absolute.
Looking back on my life, I did some crazy things,
the majority of which need not be recounted here.
Autobiography lays snares; what the autobiographer
might consider as earth-shaking, might produce
nothing more than an irritating itch between the
reader's shoulder blades. But for the artist trying to
mirror life, nothing is trivial, not even the craziest
fantasy, for that, too, is part of reality.
If in "Steppenwolf", Hesse wrote that "the way to
innocence lies ever further into guilt, ever further
into human life" - which, incidentally, is the quote
with which I prefaced my second English novel Evil
of the King Cockroach (Wild Spell of Summer, in
paperback) - it might just about be as true to say
that, while an idea or theme could sound crazy to
some people, it might not be crazy enough to be true:
hence the absurd, which is as necessary to a bearable
acceptance of life as the cooling system to an engine
all too prone to overheating.
My search for my own particular brand of
"truth" led me to employ various styles, and follow
different and contrasting approaches. Side by side
with my more naturalistic work, as are all my novels,
except, in parts, Come Again In Spring, and some of
my plays like Il-ffadd Fuq II-Bejt; Meta Morna
Tai-Mellielia; L-Imnarja Zmien II-Qtil; Bloody in
Bolivia and Mark Of The Zebra, I ventured into
"crazier" territory with Boulevard; Vum-Barala-
Zungare and Hefen Plus Zero. Zero had a tumultu-
ous reception, for and against, when it was produced
in Coventry in 1981 by Warwick University, under
the direction of Tom Lishman.
For all that, am I anywhere nearer the truth? The
exercise of stretching the intellect and the imagina-
tion may indicate a route but need not necessarily
lead to a destination.
Contradictions can also lurk in the emotions, with
the absurd not too far off. Pure romance has touched
me a few times in my life, but, while the going was
good at the time, the end result was, more often than
not, less than the expectations. It seems to me the
recurrent nightmare of most writers that they seem
incapable of learning enough from the patterned lives
and worlds they themselves create on paper, where
art, one hopes, is conjured up by the right conjunc-
tion of the intellect and the emotions.
If, conceivably, the ideal human being is balanced
on a solidly based triangle of body, spirit and mind,
how does one go about looking for this formula? It
could be that all art is a frenetic search for this elusive
triangle - in fact it tries to reproduce it; form,
content, idea. One shaky side, and the whole triangle
rocks; so it is with existence; so I presume, it must be
with art.
 One goes on trying - the foolish presumption of
the artist! But trying is all . Art may never claim to be
able to change society, but at least it can signpost it,
not through acting as its curator, but through trans-
cendent invention; after all, to invent is to try. So, on
with the search, even if what we are looking for lies
beyond the grave, as in the case of Fernand and Tessa
in one of my earlier plays, l s-Sejlia Ta' Sa rid.
I consider one of the most egotistical advantages in
my type of artistic creation as lying in the fact that,
besides writing novels and plays, I also produce for
the theatre. Writing is a lonely job (a well-tried
cliche, that) ; you are cut off from the human milieu
for vast tracts of time. Everything carries a price,
however - the human race, stinking or not, sooner
or later starts clamouring for you to rejoin it; you
cannot stay too long away from it; after all, you
belong there. I have found that producing plays is a
form of compromise with that kind of demand;
almost better than having one's books read, or one's
plays seen.
I am often asked what I like doing most; writing
novels or plays? If hard work can ever be called
enjoyment, then I like doing both, with plays stealing
an edge over novels because of the higher artistic
discipline involved, as against novel-writing where
digression is permissible. But seeing a play that you
have written coming to li fe during rehearsals in the
A scene from Vum-Barala-Zungare (1973) for the First Malta International Arts Festival
person o f actors and actresses, people you have
grown to be fond of, you come pretty close to a point
where art seems to touch life, both becoming as one,
and that constitutes a great, if ephemeral (what
isn't?), satisfaction.
When my first stage plays appeared at the Manoel
Theatre back in the Sixties, that is from 1962 on ,
most people were confused - to my great surprise;
the exercise had seemed to me so simple, so straight-
forward; what was there to get mixed up about? All I
had done was to express a need to explain reality as I
saw it, with symbolism helping to explain the knottier
bits. Commentators on my work insist that I inaugur-
ated modern theatre in Malta; Boulevard alone,
they wrote, would have been enough; but I felt I had
to go on and write more, and not simply out of any
deference to the saying that single swallows do not
make summers. I never actually and consciously set
out to pioneer anything. The whole thing just
happened, so much so that at least four of my earlier
plays are irretrievably lost, as I was in the habit of
tearing up everything once the play was done. So
much for any presumption of wooing posterity ! The
fact remains though that, when my first stage plays
with universal themes and settings began to be mis-
understood, I was more amazed than shaken .
I wonder how righ t Andre Gide was when he
wrote: " The great majority, even when composed of
the best individuals, never bestows its approbation
on what is new, potential, unconcerned, and dis-
concerting in a work, but only on what it can
recognize (Gide's italics) - that is to say, the com-
monplace ... It is important to realise that the essen-
tial value of a work of art, the quality that will ensure
its survival, never lies in conformist adherence to a
doctrine, be that doctrine the soundest and surest
possible; but rather in formulating questions that
forestall the future's and answers to questions that
have not yet been formulated."
The trouble I went through in 1962 to have the
official censor pass my first-prize-winning stage-play
Vaganzi Tas-Sajf (Summer Holidays in Vol. 3 of
my English plays) for performance at the National
Theatre in Valletta, is fully documented in the
appendix to Vol. 2 of my collected Maltese plays. As
Malta is not a totalitarian state, but very Catholic-
orientated, some people here would immediately
associate censorship with sex. Nothing of the kind in
this case. What seemed to have disturbed this
particular gentleman who, in all fairness, was well-
disposed, if stuck too fast to medieval attitudes, were
some speeches, especially by the deterministic
Hakob, on the face of God, His penchant for for-
giveness, His immanence even in the ghastliest of
realities, and the existentialism, both Christian and
pagan, of my characters, both types looking,
belatedly because of negligence, for a way to truth.
Why could not the censor see what I was trying to
do - outlining a quest for innocence and redemption
not by cutting oneself away from life, but by joining
it?
I have always entertained a great deal of respect
for the intellectual calibre, latent or otherwise, of my
fellow Maltese, and, concurrently with making sure
that I spared no pains when writing and producing a
play (adequate financial reward need not be
considered here; it was practically non-existent), I
kept on hoping that a true theatre conscience would
evolve. That could only be done by writing and
presenting still more plays and, by doing so, en-
couraging others to do the same.
This attitude that I took worked in some ways, and
it is heartening to see the interest that exists today in
modern theatre, especially among our younger active
theatre practitioners.
But coming back to the human contact in the
lonely business of creating, I am proud to have been
associated with such well-known actors and actresses
like Charles Arrigo, Karmen Azzopardi, Mario
Philip Azzopardi, Peter Borg, Doreen Grech, Lino
Grech, Karmenu Gruppetta, Godwin Scerri, Mary
Anne Scerri, Antoinette Soler, Charles Thake, Paul
Xuereb and a few others, just as dear to me; as well
as with such set designers and directors as Mario
Azzopardi, Mario Philip Azzopardi, Antoine
Camilleri, Emvin Cremona, Tony Degiovanni, Lino
40
Farrugia, Joe Friggieri, Saviour Pirotta and Tony
and Michael Stroud, all artists in their own right. I
must also mention the London-based directors Tom
Lishman and Adrian Rendle.
My all-consuming approach to writing and pro-
duction was placing a heavy strain on me, and I
used to cut loose and roam parts of Europe and the
Middle East, both before and after my visits to the
U.S.A. and Brazil. I smoked like a chimney; first,
cigarettes; then, as my finances declined, the more
expensive cigars! I roved over Dingli Cliffs - there is
in those parts of the Island, not a field, or rubble
wall, or well, or crevice, or cave that I do not know
- sometimes even before the crack of dawn. What a
marvellous sight the risiug sun is from there! The
sense and feel of the Mediterranean - my first and
enduring love - encapsulated at that uncertain
moment of day's birth. If visible nature is a
metaphor or image of the human mind, those cliffs
are my mind's.
I used to return to my typewriter, completely
refreshed and "going great guns". It has often
worried me that I can produce some of my work at
breakneck speed - a full-length play normally takes
me fifteen hours spread over three days; I am, of
course, referring to the first draft; revising and
knocking the thing into shape takes longer. My sub-
conscious seems to have it all pat. Is this one of the
contradictions to which I have alluded earlier on in
this article? An organized subconscious dead set
against a messy and seemingly directionless conscious
- that's what worries me.
Fortunately though, not completely directionless,
as I am blessed, or cursed, as the case may be, with a
heightened sense of auto-criticism. I suppose this can
be explained away by the fact that I am a Virgoan
with a Leo ascendant - that is, if one believes in
such matters, about which I am, frankly, and like
most people, ambivalent.
The work presented may bear all the hallmarks of
confidence, but the effort that may have gone into it
is hardly ever explained away in terms of the doubts
and uncertainties that constantly assail me. Echoing
Socrates, we seem to know less the more we know.
And then there is the responsibility. Whether or
not the artist is simply a slave, a servant, or a plate of
glass through which Absolute Art may deign to shine
one of its precious beams through, Christ's parable of
the talents remains as valid as ever. Use them or be
damned! Chromosomes and genes, placed together in
a certain way, through no merit, or fault, of your
own, cannot possibly be imagined arraigned in any
other, and therefore the artist must use what he has
been given in trust. The inner artistic compulsion has
often been likened to a demon; I prefer to call it,
simply, a pledge, entrusted to one, only God knows
when.
Which brings me back to my first argument: the

past is the present is the future; tail in mouth, like the
mythical serpent Ouroboros.
If your visible self ages before the eyes of others, as
indeed before your own in the bathroom mirror, that
may be a kind of measurement of distance between
the past and the so-called present. But does this
terrestrial distancing occur, too, in one's unmanifested
self?
Just as we start dying (are dead?) before we are
even born, so I imagine catharsis to occur at the very
moment of the act. If history is time, art is more than
time.
Joseph's psychological search for roots and his
disintegration in In The Eye Of The Sun is a form
of catharsis begun the very moment that education
and civilization took hold of him, and the seed of his
mother's insanity turned into shoot. A personalized
theme, that simply begged to be expanded to social
and politico-sociological dimensions, as in Menz
and Requiem For A Malta Fascist. In the end is the
beginning, and vice-versa.
We often tend to blame ourselves for wasting time,
but, as I pointed out in another play, Golden Tut,
time may be wasting us instead, by giving us the idea,
or rather delusion, of distancing.
The fear of dating a play or novel has always had a
daunting effect on me - not out of any desire to
court timelessness as such, but because I have always
been conscious of the evanescence of things, time
warped, time as it truly is - a nothing of a moment.
It was this reluctance to engage time as a chron-
ological date that for several years kept me back
from writing plays about a specific society (for
instance, Maltese) at a specific point in history. I
used to argue with myself: how concerned are we
now with, say, the corrupt society of Stendhal's and
Baudelaire's time? Novels apart, I concentrated
Rehearsal break for the
author, director (Lino
Farrugia) and cast of
Vum-Bara/a-Zungare
instead on universal themes and universal man. This
lasted until I discovered - I was slow in this - that
specific aspects and periods of society need not date,
given certain timeless themes, like those engaging the
emotions, which will be with us, only slightly
modified exteriorly, for a long time to come.
Timeless, too, I should say are the values of the
land, even more so in the face of rapid technological
advance: a theme I have explo:ted in Leap Of Malta
Dolphins; In The Eye Of The Sun and Meta Morna
Tal-Melliena.
So is living truth after all to be found on this earth
- or at least a glimmer of it, like the sun's reflection
in a broken piece of glass - only if we embrace the
idea of timelessnes, regardless of personal mortality?
I remember that, when my son Frank died tragically
in 1972, it took no more than just a few months to
come to terms with this terrible event. One day the
idea came to me, after praying hard for it. It was
this; I would live for him too, throughout my own
life-span. My present was going to be his; his past
and future, my present.
As Miguel says in my "American" novel Come
Again In Spring: "There is a time for this, and a
titne for that." I do not think he ~as being precise
enough.
Pope John XXIII put it much better, just before he
died: ''Every day is a good day to be born; every day
is a good day to die''.
Literature's recurrent task, as I see it, is to try and
split the unity (atom) of universal time in order to
enlighten us, earthbound creatures, on those
mysteries which our idea of time forces us to live with
between each beginning and end - the mysteries of
joy, of sadness, of wonder.
Francis Ebejer
41