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Intro
“The Fly in the Ointment” takes place on a bleak autumn afternoon in 1930s England. A taxi stops in a rundown area of an unnamed city, and Harold—35 years old, balding, shabbily dressed—steps out. He has come to visit his father, whose factory is shutting its doors today under vague but disreputable circumstances, terminating his 30-year career. Harold arrives intending to help his suddenly bankrupt father, but as he approaches the factory, his mind races with thoughts of his father’s well-known greed and crookedness. His father answers the door and they uncomfortably greet one another, seemingly not having spoken in some time. The 65-year-old father is neat, sharply dressed, and full of life, in stark contrast to his shambling, anxious son. In fact, the father disdains his son’s unremarkable existence as a poorly compensated rural lecturer. He maintains courtesy, however, as he walks Harold through the now empty and silent factory.
The father rejects Harold’s awkward statements of his concern, prompting Harold to jokingly call him an optimist. The father takes this quite seriously and launches into an extended monologue about optimism, claiming it’s all that keeps him going now that he’s lost everything. Abruptly, he pivots to pointing out his son’s growing baldness: Harold’s failure to address it with cosmetics exemplifies, for his father, his lack of ambition. According to the father, Harold needs to think big. Harold blurts out that thinking big has been the father’s downfall. Offended, the father rattles off names of real tycoons who’ve gone equally bust in the economic downturn. As the shadow of nearby window-bars seems momentarily to frame his father in a cell, Harold ponders the rumors of his fraudulent dealings.
Suddenly, the father hears a fly in his office and goes all-in on killing it, climbing after it onto a table and repeatedly declaring his hatred of flies. Harold halfheartedly assists until the father finds himself suddenly spent and needs his son’s help getting down from the table. When Harold asks if he’s all right, the father once again pivots with renewed vigor to his son’s baldness. Harold redoubles his sympathy, plunging his father into sentimental reflection. When the father begins to analyze his life’s mistakes, Harold is mortified that he may be forced to explicitly acknowledge his father’s professional (and legal) misdeeds. Instead, the father claims that lust for money has been his problem, and now he only wants to get away to some remote seaside cottage. In disbelief, Harold points out that this fantasy requires money. His father rejects this, dreamily saying money will come to him one way or another. Harold finally stammers out that despite his own meager finances, he can find a way to “raise” money if his father truly needs it. The father’s wistful renunciation of money vanishes, and he heatedly demands how—and how soon—his son can “raise” money for him.
