Elephants Do Forget

Elephants Do Forget is the title of Edmund Swettenham’s first completed play, a three-act farce that emerges when his attempt at a novel gives way to comic drama. The title’s apparent contradiction becomes a recurring joke: people hear it and insist that elephants do not forget, turning the play’s success into a repeated test of how readily a phrase can prompt the same response.

From Novel to Farce

Edmund begins with a novel whose material he describes as grim and self-consciously serious: an unshaven man getting out of bed, grey streets, a sick old woman, a vicious young woman, and characters who talk at length about the state of the world and why they are alive. As he works on it, he finds himself sharing the characters’ bleak questioning. A comic idea interrupts that mood. He jots it down, develops it into a scene, and discovers that the scene has captured his interest more strongly than the novel.

The change is not a planned turn from one literary career to another. Edmund says he did not know what he was doing until he had finished a farce in three acts. The play thus begins almost incidentally, through the discovery that a comic scene can hold his attention where the novel’s sustained gloom cannot. Its finished form is brisk and theatrical in contrast with the novel he abandoned.

Title and Reception

When Patrick Simmons asks the play’s name, Edmund first acknowledges that it might easily have been called What the Butler Saw, then gives its actual title, Elephants Do Forget. The exchange establishes the work as a completed play rather than merely an idea: Edmund adds that it has been accepted and is going to be produced. His unexpected shift into playwriting has already brought a concrete professional result.

Later, Edmund reports that the play is running in London and doing very well. The title, however, prompts an almost automatic objection. A speaker tells him that he has always understood elephants do not forget; Edmund answers that he has begun to think naming the play was a mistake, because so many people make precisely that observation. The joke depends on the gap between the title’s assertion and the popular belief it appears to contradict, and on the repetition of that correction in conversation.

Recurring Joke and Narrative Function

The title’s joke returns in a scene involving Bunch Harmon. On hearing Edmund’s announcement, she murmurs that she thought elephants did not forget. The Rev. Julian Harmon gives a guilty start, then remembers that he has been so absorbed in the conversation that he has neglected his sermon. The title therefore does more than supply a punchline: it marks the distraction produced by the gathering’s lively conversation, while the minister’s sudden recollection brings the scene back to his abandoned duty.

The later exchange with Edmund shows the joke recurring beyond that initial scene and even after the play has found an audience. In both instances, the title draws attention away from the play’s plot and toward its wording; people respond not with a discussion of the farce but with the same supposed natural-history correction. That repetition gives the expression a compact comic life of its own. It also makes the title an apt emblem for a work born from Edmund’s departure from one kind of writing into another: the serious novel falls away, but the phrase that names the resulting comedy stays in people’s minds.