The 'Magenta Moment' in Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus

Abstract

IN Act 2 of Habeas Corpus, Alan Bennett’s parody of the English bedroom farce, we learn that Lady Rumpers, an archetypal grande dame from the Colonies, was impregnated during an air raid in the course of World War II. The mysterious terms in which she refers to the event—‘One mad magenta moment and I have paid for it all my life’1—can be explained by a camp memoir of that war by Geoffrey Handley-Taylor—Magenta Moments—the tone and content of which are caught in its opening sentences: ‘Rasputin’s philosophy that one must sin to enjoy life, and then think about being saved, is well-founded. Indeed until such time as I had transgressed in most ways, my existence on this planet was grossly intolerable’.2 And its title derives from its epigraph—‘Many a mad magenta minute | Lights the lavender of life’—by an eccentric Anglo-Catholic priest called Sandys Wason. This seems to imply that moments of intensity (or in Handley-Taylor’s take, pleasurable ‘sin’) alleviate (‘light’ in the sense of ‘lighten’) and irradiate (‘light’ in the sense of ‘enlighten’) the longueurs of existence, a metaphor based on misprision, incidentally, since if one were to attenuate magenta with white (to make a tint of the chrome), one would end up with a mauvish pink and not with lavender. However, ‘lavender’, as a code word for ‘homosexual’, is grist to Handley-Taylor’s mill. Since Bennett refers to a ‘magenta moment’ rather than a ‘minute’, he clearly has the memoir rather than the originating Wason epigraph in mind, and it’s in fact the memoir itself that more conveniently ‘lights’ (in the sense of ‘illumines’) the reckless sexual behaviour that the War often unleashed in people, the subject of a verse episode in the play that records encounters in Nissen huts and the like.