X=0 is dedicated to Drinkwater’s friend, novelist and dramatist, Gilbert Cannan. Their friendship and professional respect for each other is evidenced in the Preface to the 1920 publication of Cannan’s play Everybody’s Husband which was played on the same bill as X=0. Everybody’s Husband is dedicated to Drinkwater with the words ‘To whom I owe much’. In turn X=0 is dedicated to Cannan. Both men were conscientious objectors and one can only imagine the moral and mental support they found in this shared principle against government propaganda and the prevailing mood in the country.
In 1916, Cannan suffered a mental breakdown which he described in his book, The Release of the Soul. This breakdown was caused by the devastating effects of the war and the threat of conscription. In the extract below he amusingly and lovingly describes the part Drinkwater and Birmingham Rep played in his recovery:
Preface to Everybody’s Husband (New York: B.W. Huebsch [c1920]
After a serious illness in 1916 my Doctor entered into discussion as to the proper place for my convalescence. I declared for Birmingham and his jaw dropped as he had never considered Birmingham as a health resort. I explained that Birmingham contained the only healthy theatre in England and that the theatre is the only place to go to for one’s health. I don’t think he understood me, but, having attended me for some months he had discovered that I am so constituted that I do thing my own way or not at all and he humoured my whim, as he must have thought it. I wrote to John Drinkwater who, thinking I had taken leave of my senses, came rushing up to London, saw me, humoured me, consented – solemnly, for John like so many of my friends, has the mistaken notion that I am a tragic character. Hence much confusion. I am much more serious than that.
I arrived in Birmingham, my chosen health resort, to find everybody forewarned to sympathise with the tragedy of my broken health, whereas in fact, I had never been so well in my life, also honest John in the throes of composition. He had written a war-play about Greeks and Trojans and the ladies of the company were complaining that there were no parts for them in it. To soothe them I promised to produce a play in which there should be only women and in a day or two I was ready with that small fantasy: Everybody’s Husband (Birmingham thought the title shocking!).
Drinkwater’s play X=0 and my own were produced on the same night: I had left a good deal behind me in London, including my dress clothes, and John insisted that if my play was a success I must take a call. I pointed out the impossibility of my doing any such thing since it is well known that dramatic authors live and work and sleep in their dress clothes. He insisted even to the point of offering me the use of his after he had done with them, and that appealed to my sense of humour. John’s play was a success and the mood of success settled over the evening so that I knew I was safe in pelting into my clothes. My play was a success, people said “Bravo” and I appeared like a real dramatic author with an expanse of white shirt front (John Drinkwater’s). So that now when people ask me incredulously, “What Plays?” I can point to Everybody’s Husband and say that I am the only man alive who has worn the dress-clothes of the author of Abraham Lincoln. That is fame, and the anecdote is to be taken seriously.
Gilbert Cannan
New York, November, 1919
Sadly, in 1923 Cannan suffered another mental breakdown which proved untreatable. He became a patient at the Priory Hospital, Roehampton. He then spent the rest of his life confined to Holloway Sanatorium near Virginia Water where he died of cancer on 30 June 1955.
friend or foe 2016 