The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  I flew back to Minnesota to pay my double homages, visiting Sil at Abbott Northwestern Hospital and my father in his new digs at Faribault, attempting to cook for Mom, staying on the couch while Dana bunked with her.

  My arrival annoyed Sil. “You visit for this? Jesus. Come for a birthday, but not this. I got the TV to work, but I can’t find the game. This is going to be the year. Puckett? My God. Hrbek? I have to beat this cancer until October.”

  I helped him pull up the Twins game on his porthole TV, and we spoke of nothing but baseball. I tried to ease my conscience: “Sil, I’ve been very, you know, in New York, far from here, and, even before that—”

  “If you’re about to say you’ve become a Yankees fan, you should just leave. Right now.”

  “No, God, no, not that. Jesus Christ, that’s not even funny. No, I just wanted to apologize, and say thank you, I guess, or sorry, if I’ve ever—”

  “Please, please, stop. Artie, stop. I can’t hear the game.”

  I was not to be thwarted in my quest to make everything right and everyone aware of all my lapses, to be forgiven, not for anything in particular but for my personality. I studied Sil’s unshaven face, the translucent gray whiskers like fish bones. Sil was going to die, and my future—my hope to go on with a normal life—depended on not leaving things unsaid, not letting people go without a communion of our feelings.

  But Sil was having none of it, deftly blocked all my advances. My relentless pursuit of absolution continued to be of no interest to him. I slapped myself against the stones of Sil, for whom no topic (other than the Twins) justified any sort of emotional outburst or self-examination.

  I told him that I loved him. He laughed for a while and nodded. And lived for another twenty-two years.

  “Dad,” I tried at the prison. “I’ve been looking hard at myself and … I think you’re in here because of me, and I’m sorry.” Imagine how important I would be if this were true! Having spent some time being a terrible father myself now, this is what I think I was saying: “Tell me I’m important to you. Tell me you’re sorry you missed my youth. Tell me we could have been something else.” My father, no doubt trying to be kind and rid me of any guilt in the matter, told the truth and said, “That’s ridiculous. I put myself in here. Nothing you could have done or said could have stopped that. You’re very funny.” He also said, “I’m in the right place. I’ve got something huge to work on, to keep me busy in here. I sometimes think I couldn’t be happier.”

  “Mom,” I tried once more. “I’m thinking of moving back to Minneapolis.”

  “Are you in trouble at work?”

  “Of course not. I was just thinking, Sil’s sick, maybe you’d like to have—”

  “You hang around making me feel old? That’s very sweet. You could bring me meals on wheels or change my colostomy bag. First I have to get one, but just knowing you’re there for me, I can hardly wait. I’ll call my doctor in the morning. Listen, how does Dana seem to you? Has she got herself together okay? I can’t tell when she’s putting on a brave face to calm me down. Do you think New York is okay for her? You want to be useful, you could make sure she’s not letting herself get too stressed again.”

  And so I flew back to New York with Dana, decided—in my next swing—that I was irrelevant to them all, and that was okay, if I could just be a man about it. I tried to write short stories about all this good stuff, changing everyone’s name but little else, and the stories always sucked. I pseudonymously submitted them anyhow to some literary magazines and shuffled a deck of rejections.

  Act III: King Arthur, pressured into marrying to secure Britain’s peace, rejects a valuable French offer and instead marries for love: his friend Constantine’s sister, Guenhera, who has loved Arthur since he was a boy. (It’s pronounced GWEN-er-UH, I think.) That dog trainer reappears, discussing the marriage (and Guenhera’s pregnancy) in relation to all the illegitimate children Arthur has strewn across Britain. The queen miscarries, and Arthur—as loving of his wife as he once was mad for shepherd girls—demobilizes his army to cultivate his kingdom of peace and art, nostalgic for his own childhood peace. He spends most of his time indulging his wife, failing to be military enough. The Earl of Cumbria voices his disgust at the feminized, debauched court and considers assassinating Arthur.

  Act III causes me the most trouble. After Arthur marries, one of his many abandoned loves finds comfort with a kindly shepherd named Silvius, willing to marry Arthur’s sloppy seconds. This is more than the most lenient statistician can bear.

  16

  DANA WAS CAST as Ophelia in a Hamlet out in New Jersey. I went out there one night to pick her up after rehearsal. I arrived early, sat in the dark theater, and listened to her castmates up onstage discussing their approach to a tricky scene.

  Shakespeare’s plays, unlike most modern scripts, rarely include stage direction and never any of those adverbs that force us to read or perform a certain way. No “(angrily)” or “He crosses on her last word and delicately strokes the sword.” Instead, each reader and actor is given the chance to make sense of the puzzle himself, to peer into the wavering mirror and report back. This is, I believe, one of the reasons Shakespeare continues to be popular: he offers directors a share of credit, lets them add their two cents. It also makes actors and directors responsible for justifying weaknesses in the plays. To wit:

  The older actress playing Gertrude was making a point, reading from her open script: “… fantastic garlands did she make / Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids—see, wait a sec. Why does she do that? I’m telling you your sister killed herself, and that’s very sad, but I stop to point out that some flowers look like penises?”

  There was much theatrical tittering onstage. The blond boy playing Laertes offered: “She’s nervous. You know, people giving bad news sort of go off-point, blurt the first thing comes to mind. You could play it like that.”

  “That’s not bad,” agreed the director. “Anyone else?”

  “Bollocks,” said the bearded Scottish giant playing Claudius. “Big fat hairy bollocks. She’s not hemming. Not a bit of it. She can’t help it. She’s a filthy bird, our Gertrude. She knows Claudius is watching her, laughing at Laertes behind his back, and so, even breaking young Laertes’ heart, Gert winks at her man and makes a cock joke, because you and I are All. About. That.” And with that he grabbed his stage queen’s rump and she swatted at him with her rolled-up script.

  My sister laughed but interrupted: “No, because here she’s already regretting marrying you. Hamlet’s convinced her you’re a murderer.”

  “Codswallop! He didn’t convince her of anything, girlie,” said the actor, whom I now disliked intensely and strongly suspected of not being Scottish. “When she’s rolling about with him in the boudoir and Polonius’s blood is splashed all over the place, she’s just playing along. She’s coddling her pantywaist son. Boy didn’t tell her anything she didn’t know. She doesn’t care. She knew all about me from day one. She’s a Mafia wife, she is. She lives for a bit of rough, long purple.” And he reached again for the ass of the nice middle-aged part-time actress and mother from Montclair.

  It was all very precious, and I complained about their manner to Dana afterward, over rum and Cokes. And, boring old me, I couldn’t help pointing out my theory: “That was perfect. Shakespeare was the greatest creator of Rorschach tests in history. That’s why we keep going back to him for the ten billionth production of this lame play. Look, look: you have a weak spot where Will’s not thinking very clearly, and the character rambles on, and Will sticks in a joke that he likes about flowers that look like wieners. It plainly doesn’t belong there. Any editor would cut it. It breaks the rhythm and the logic of the scene. And your sweet old Gertrude noticed it and rightly points out the weak spot. Anybody else, we’d say, ‘Whoops. Not buying it, Will.’ If I wrote it, they’d send me home to rework it. Instead, what do you all do? You all talk it out
until you make it make sense for him. He wrote it, so it must be right. You six very intelligent people form a committee to offer him your help, and when you’ve done the best you can, consulting old books of other would-be helpers, when you actually come up with some very clever solutions, you marvel at him for composing such a subtle moment.”

  Dana replied, “When you talk crap like that, riding your hobbyhorse all over the room, do you even know it’s about Dad? Do you even know you’re mad at him, that you won’t forgive him because you have a small heart? You’ve so conflated him with his favorite writer that you want to punish one by taking shots at the other. Do you know that?”

  “I do know you did that, and you think I’m not original enough to have my own ideas. But that doesn’t mean I have to roll over and agree with you. I could even be mad at your father—”

  “My father?”

  “—and still be right about this. You’re part of a vast, unconscious conspiracy of enablers, all of whom operate without central control but to the same end: to make a man who died four centuries ago into a god. I honestly don’t know what you get out of it, but there it is.”

  “How is that not about Dad?”

  Samuel Pepys, the noted seventeenth-century diarist (rather like being noted for writing a lot of shopping lists), judged Romeo and Juliet “the worst [play] that ever I heard in my life.” He was not alone in that view, but claim such a thing today and you’ll be dismissed as a philistine. As Herman Melville already noted back in 1850, before the Shakespeare-industrial complex had crushed our spirit, “This absolute and unconditional adoration of Shakespeare has grown to be part of our Anglo-Saxon superstitions … Intolerance has come to exist in this matter. You must believe in Shakespeare’s unapproachability, or quit the country. But what sort of a belief is this for an American?” I liked Moby-Dick until I read that quote. Now I love Moby-Dick.

  If it didn’t have his name on it, half his work would be booed off the stage, dismissed by critics as stumbling, run out of print. Instead we say it’s Shakespeare; he must be doing something profound that we don’t appreciate. Compare: a blogger on The Egyptologist: “Phillips, clumsy as a newborn calf, totters through the opening scenes, farting exposition as the urge touches him.”

  Shakespeare and I, admittedly, have a necessarily strained relationship by now, and as I (and others) judge my own writing harshly, I can’t help but point out that he is let off easy all the time. You really can’t say that this or that bit of dialogue is overdone or undercooked, forced exposition here, unnecessary repetition there, implausibility, inconsistency, haste or languor: no, any apparent crime is excused by some fork-tongued Shakespearologist, another volunteer public defender who leaps up to paper over the fault with some new reading or explanation, for the master can do no wrong, by definition. Any faults we perceive are in us, his faulty readers. (He saw that one coming, too: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.) Everything was intentional, perfect, deep, multilayered, or you can “quit the country.” Or “That’s really you talking about Dad.” And all of us become his fools.

  17

  BUT DANA WAS RIGHT. I look at my “spontaneous” and “original” actions from this distance and they course with motivation and years of previous history. Here, in this letter of April 23, 1992, written at the end of an agency trip to London, we see the abandoned child running further and further from his resentments and wounds:

  D,

  We had a day off after we landed and the hotel wouldn’t let us check in early, so I joined a side trip to wander in your woods, yours and Dad’s. I visited lovely Stratford-upon-Avon. I’ve seen your man’s house now (a museum with a plastic ham on a replica dining table). I’ve walked in his magic forest (the sliver of it that remains between two expressways). I’ve watched actors in drag prance and spittle his words. I’ve gone looking for his ghost in the streets that remain, the furrowed fields that remain, the churchyard he walked, the tomb he fills.

  Back in London this week, I even went to a psychic, one very drunken evening, and investigated my future and yours, and received satisfactory answers, and then I thought to ask if Shakespeare was watching us from the other side. Good news, Dana: “He’s writing there. Right now!”

  Last night—in honor of our birthdays, or because of his egomaniacal paranormal interference—your Bard hogged the conversation with two Germans I met in a pub near our hotel. Heidi and Günter had come on holiday from Meisen to see the RSC in Stratford and were now taking two days in twentieth-century London before returning home. Over drinks, I explained the earl and Binyamin Feivel as best I could remember, and I asked if they’d suspected that half the plays they’d seen this week were written by a Jewish banker’s son. They laughed politely, not sure if they were the butt of some joke about Germans.

  Heidi and Günter were “not engaging to marry,” according to Günter, standing at the bar, before we’d even had a first pint together. “We do not see the reason for it. We are together and that is all.” One of those premature explanations or unprovoked self-descriptions that fling and gyrate awkwardly in the middle of conversation, implying recent tiffs and incomplete makeups. Heidi’s answering silence set my suspicions up on their hind legs.

  By the time we’d had a few rounds, Günter had been telling me for an hour how Shakespeare was the most brilliant man ever to write or even think, “more human even than Goethe,” whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. He did not stop for an instant to ask what sort of work had brought me to London, but roared on and on, about the plays they’d seen up at Stratford, the “global humanness” he’d witnessed and understood even more deeply this time, how in every culture everyone loved him without fail, how grateful Günter was to great Shakespeare for “making us” and “opening our eyes.” Heidi nodded now and then and watched me nod politely. I could see it: when I allowed just the tiniest, most deniable flicker of mockery to sparkle on my face, to cast the tiniest shadow across Günter’s earnest, happy performance, she smiled and drank and Günter thought she was smiling for him, and he put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close so her head cricked away from him, and she looked up at me, drew a swizzle stick between her lips and across the cradling tip of her tongue, draining a drop of Malibu and Coke from it as it passed, and Günter seemed further and further away, and his Shakespeare love was more and more laughable. Less than laughable: irrelevant to this planet. Inhuman. The opposite of universal. An annoying hobby. Stamps.

  One drink led to another, and we walked out arm in arm in arm, Heidi in the middle, into the London night, until our mouths were sticky with salty mist and hours-old liquor and German cigarettes. We stumbled along, and then there were bells. “You know, it is today!” Günter yelled, as the clock above Dixon’s Gloves showed it was past midnight. “Today is probably his birthday. Four hundred twenty-eight! Do you know this? Happy birthday, Willy!” he shouted, quite pleased with himself, and from dark corners and behind shuttered windows voices called back, “Happy birthday!” Günter supported himself with one hand against an apartment building while with his other he fished out his lederhosenschnitzel (much ado about nothing, if I may) and urinated a shadow onto the wall and a black mirror onto the sidewalk, first a drizzle, then a tempest.

  I delicately stepped out of view around the corner and was considering whether I’d had enough of my Krauts when Heidi joined me. From our shadow, we heard the bobby arrive: “Oi! You there!” and heard Günter stammer his excuses to the constable, though the sound of his flow continued on and on and embarrassingly on. The cop said, “You a German then?” in a tone implying it would be best if Günter claimed to be Swiss. “Yes, sir, and I am very sorry, Mr. Policeman, for the urining, but you know it is the birthday of your William Shakespeare.” The cop put on a ludicrous German accent and hissed, Gestapo-style, “Papers, please.” “What do you mean? My papers? Yes, okay, my fiancée has our passports. You need the passport?”

  Ah, Dana, now
he claimed a respectable fiancée. She would have none of it. Heidi’s eyes were so beautifully wide and blue. She shrank farther into shadow, took my hand, and placed her index finger’s silken nicotine whorls against my opening lips.

  Günter had taken on quite a load back at the pub and was discharging still. He could neither accelerate nor stop, and it seemed the bobby was going to wait him out and hold each passed milliliter against him, each drop an affront to English law. “This is acceptable behavior and hygiene in Germany, is it?” he sneered, though he had likely urinated on his share of British buildings (and German ones, blearily following some football club to Munich, looking for a brawl).

  When Günter’s untimely release came to its hesitant, dribbled conclusion, he called out, “Heidi? Our-toor? Where are you?” The cop said, “Oi, that’s making a noisome disturbance, Fritzy, on top of the indecency. Come on, then. Off we go.”