The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  After ten minutes, at the most, asking after his daily routine and complimenting him on his retained youthfulness (he did look pretty good for seventy-two, not much older than my last visit, three or four years earlier), I couldn’t help myself any longer. I very uncoolly asked him if he’d had the time (!) to take a look at my novel yet.

  He nodded eagerly, was very kind, effusive, really, in his praise of it, the imagery, the story, everything. It’s difficult to describe the relief and love, the pride and love, the happiness and love, the sense of having forgiven and having been forgiven, both at the same instant. I should have been satisfied. I should have kissed him and flown back quickly to the Czech Republic to work on my next book and my indifference and my adulthood and my marriage.

  Instead, I blundered on, blubbered forward. “There was something of you in the character of Imre, you know.”

  “Was there? I—I didn’t … sense myself in him.”

  He met my eye, and I knew, and I didn’t even call him on it, just felt disappointment as a sudden outrushing of all my air, almost of muscular control. I slumped against the table, trying to catch an in breath.

  “I think he traded it for cigarettes,” I told Dana back in New York on the way home, futilely garbing pain in a joke for her.

  “First edition? Warmly inscribed? Must have gotten a carton at least.”

  “I would hope.” I melted into her couch.

  “Well, come on, what did you expect, really? It was already written out centuries ago. The half-made man, self-loathing, comes to his wizardly father for approval, for his freedom to become fully human. Sound familiar, Caliban?”

  “No. That sounds forced and irrelevant and annoying.”

  Dana was reading a book by Harold Bloom, a Yale professor who traveled all the way to the maximalist and insane thesis that Shakespeare invented how people now live, communicate, think. Before Shakespeare, we were different, and since the plays have sunk into us (taught, explained, performed, filmed, turned into other works by later artists), we have all slowly but surely become like his characters. We think as he showed us people could think. Life is true to his art, not vice versa. The logical extreme evolution of our slavish love for this one writer ends in blasphemy: he is literally our creator. Dana, obsessing over the book with an enthusiasm that made me worry she’d stopped taking her medication, had decided that I most resembled the slave barbarian enthralled to the old magician in The Tempest. “Tell me you know how stupid that idea is,” I begged.

  She was still living in our old rent-controlled one-bedroom. It was immediately comfortable to be with her back in New York, to wallow in nostalgia for our younger arrangement, if only for a couple of days of meetings with Random House and my agent, interviews about Prague. She seemed at first to be thriving, perfectly suited to her surroundings. (I often used that phrase to describe happiness in others back then, as I realized how ill at ease and increasingly lost I was feeling in Prague.) She had no shortage of friends. People said hello to her all over the neighborhood, and her voicemail and email were clogged with invitations. She was at thirty-eight as physically lovely as ever, maybe even more so. She was single, still went out and met women when the need hit her, but it rarely did. When I arrived in town, I went straight to her rehearsal for an off-Broadway Beckett production, and she was clearly well liked there. Cast members sat next to me during breaks, excited to meet Dana’s twin and hear my stories about her past lives and loves, until the director passively aggressed from the stage, “I would hate to clear the house of family and friends, but I will have silence now, please. Thank you.”

  But for all this, Dana’s loneliness emerged, and it was troubling. She took my arm, leaned in close to me, pleased me with her relief at my visit, her need of me, her questions about my next book, about the boys, the gifts she had for them. She didn’t want to go out, turned down all invitations from cast and crew.

  Instead she holed us up in our old apartment, where we feasted out of white cartons with trusted old pagodas on the sides and watched DVDs of the young actress Anne Hathaway. When Dana was out west with a role in a pilot for a TV show that was never picked up, she had developed a powerful crush on Hathaway, having seen but not met her at a party in Hollywood. She paused each film whenever there was a close-up of the starlet’s face, her oversized features, her sparkling eyes. “I get the strangest feeling about her,” Dana said, after we’d emptied a village of pagodas and two bottles of wine. “When I look at her, I have the feeling that she is it, somehow. She’d be it if we ever met.” Dana had even written fan letters to her, an act of subservience she had previously stooped to only for Harold Bloom. She’d invited Hathaway to the opening nights of the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway plays that made up her own professional life, and, in the most openly affectionate letter, she quoted the sonnet to her namesake: “ ‘I hate’ from hate away she threw / And saved my life, saying ‘not you.’ ”

  “I’ve never sent them,” she said to my undisguised worry, but she was lying. “I’m not as far gone as all that.” She did, however, suggest, “Maybe you could write a screenplay with a part for her. And then you could introduce us.” Dana was a professional actress, but she didn’t ask me to write something for her to star in, only something for her fanciful crush. I offered her some of my Czech antidepressants, which she sampled. “Are you still taking something?” I asked. “Forty is coming. Only a fool would go in unarmed.”

  I don’t want to paint her during that week in one color. She was also her amazing self, asking after everything, reporting on Mom and Sil, insightful and funny and loving and generous and intensely interested in my boys. She stayed up all night reading the manuscript pages of my next book before my flight home in the morning. She suggested a different ending, and I rewrote the book to her specifications. (“You’re smart to leave out the lesbians this time,” she said. “You’re not strong at them.”) It was my most successful novel, and several reviews quoted a passage Dana wrote in my manuscript’s margins.

  I returned to my life in Prague, made more alienating by the comparison to home, by the feeling that Dana needed me, by the memory of my father’s face when he lied. I tried to settle into my Czech routines, my foreign family. I suffered an odd symptom: I started to lose my language skills. I had increasing difficulty recalling Czech vocabulary and grammar. I grew so frustrated that I went back to language school, even though I had been fluent and at one point had burnished my accent and slang to the point that I occasionally passed as Czech for a few minutes at a time. I ended up talking to a therapist about it.

  That old childhood daydream came back: I was saddled with Shakespeare’s company again, though he was now fully adapted to modern life, reliant on his cellphone, jaywalking to reach a hot dog stand after a meeting at my publisher’s. I still didn’t like him: that same haircut, but now in jeans and a Yankees sweatshirt. There was, though, something I was desperate to ask him, the same questions I wanted my father to answer: Am I good? Will I be okay? But every time this daydream raged, it had to end with me struggling foolishly to win his distracted attention. “Take those off for a minute,” I say.

  “What?” Shakespeare shouts, the airplane headphones blocking out everything except the romantic comedy he’s watching. I mime and mouth for him to take off the headphones. “There’s no pause function on this,” he says, half-trying to hide his exasperation at my intrusion. “She’s a hotel chambermaid, very earthy. And the guy … wait, not him, wait … him, that guy, him: he’s a millionaire hotel guest, very uptight. They’re made for each other, but they don’t know it yet.”

  And I tell him to go back to his movie.

  I wrote to my father, still, from Prague, wrote for him, still. The definition of insanity, the twelve-steppers have patiently taught me, one day at a time, is to do the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. I wrote for him, still. I have now written four novels, and I devised the idea of an anagram for him to decipher over years. The first letters
of the titles of my novels are S, P, E, and A. I planned to write, with all my remaining years, books initialed S, H, A, K, E, R, and E, and then, maybe, A, N, D, M, E.

  Shakespeare’s lines are a nursery of titles for other, better writers: Pale Fire, Exit Ghost, Infinite Jest, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Sound and the Fury, Unnatural Acts, The Quick and the Dead, Against the Polack, To Be or Not to Be, Band of Brothers, Casual Slaughters. At the very least, I have never named one of my books after his stuff.

  20

  ACT IV: King Arthur has allowed his court to become so feminized and debauched that the queen gets an hour every day to run things, putting knights on trial for charges of rudeness or romantic misbehavior. This ends only when a refreshed Saxon army invades England yet again, thanks to Arthur’s soft and distracted defense policies. This harsh lesson teaches Arthur, finally, that his job, and the nature of life, is to be constantly at war with someone. He has no natural allies to help fight the Saxons because he impulsively married for love, rejecting the French. Since Arthur still doesn’t have an heir (Guenhera has miscarried twice), he is forced to name Mordred his heir in exchange for military assistance against the Saxons, barring any natural-born children. Guenhera, pregnant again, waits for news of the battle of Linmouth, and goes into labor. Mordred, having assisted Arthur in defeating the Saxons, finds himself both jealous of and charmed by Arthur and realizes he’s been fooled: Arthur will never let him be King of Britain. He vows to force the issue, perhaps even seduce Guenhera himself, proving God’s will by producing a child with her. On his way to another war in Ireland, this one a war of choice, Arthur returns to court to see his wife, who has miscarried for the third time. Young Philip of York appears, claiming to be King Arthur’s son (perhaps from Arthur’s mysterious layover in York back in Act II). Arthur, solving his political problem at great cost to others, impulsively makes Philip his heir and forces the queen to accept him. Later, Philip admits in soliloquy that he is an impostor.

  Is it the dialogue headings down the left margin over and over again—“ARTHUR PHILIP ARTHUR PHILIP ARTHUR PHILIP”—that make me leery?

  Dana called me in Prague, the night of July 18, 2009, to say that Sil, whose long illness I had come to permanently view as temporary, had taken a critical turn, and that I should fly to Minneapolis immediately if I wanted to say goodbye.

  The next morning, on my way out of the apartment to the airport, my wife and I had one of those fights that are entirely unnecessary, in which everyone is simply reciting lines scripted by their worst impulses, a dull sequel to old fights, a dull prologue to later fights, a DVD frozen on the same stupid mid-blink face of a normally good-looking actor.

  Jana’s mother, once such charming local color, so amusingly foreign and so obviously unrelated to my sexy Czech-model girlfriend, was now a live-in nightmare and plainly the mother of my increasingly foreign and disgruntled wife. Jana’s mother and sister had both married men who were relentlessly and regretlessly unfaithful, and so the ladies had seized the opportunity while I was packing for my trip to Sil’s deathbed to express their breakfast-table certainty, in front of our twins, that I was having an affair. Jana—very much the child of her mother’s dour Czech unhappiness and sullen victimhood—allowed her buttons to be masterfully pushed. Reminders of my authorial unpredictability and American suspiciousness were ringing in the room, and Jana greeted me with tearful accusations in front of the boys and her nodding mother and sister. The script called for her to break something, so she indulged in a single dramatic but economical flying saucer and an alienating stream of Czech obscenities, amusing to Tomáš and Miloš, then almost fifteen and, for the time being, just about done with me anyhow. My steady, then angry (and truthful) denials launched her defensive weapon: she had slept with … it doesn’t matter whom. I said I didn’t believe her, which was a serious tactical blunder because I thought she was unattractive, did I? Broken by giving birth (a rather contemptuous sweep of the arm at my laughing sons) to them? I thought she couldn’t win another man? “Arrogant American Jew!” Oy vey.

  And so—on the long flight, the endless day as time zones passed in one direction at the same speed that time passed in the other and noon held on and on for hours beneath me, and, later, disoriented in the JFK holding area where counterterrorism shades into countertourism—if I allowed myself to believe that Jana had cheated on me, then it was a delusion of jet lag and stress and sorrow, but one I could pull from my luggage again, further on in this story, as necessary.

  21

  I ARRIVED IN MINNEAPOLIS. My stepfather had died while I was nodding off in a pressurized cabin.

  It was the end of a love story, great at least for its many possible interpretations. Perhaps it was the comedy of Silvius the devoted lover whose dedication survived my mother’s false first choice (Shakespeare taught Jane Austen that trick). Or perhaps it was the tragedy of my mother settling for the dull, second-best offer, because her true love was too unsteady, flew too close to the sun, unable to tame himself to ordinary, human love—the poster on her daughter’s wall daily reminding her of The Tragedy of her first husband. How to define that second marriage to a first love? Each new scrap of evidence recolors all the rest, just as a good director can decide whether Henry V will be a hero, a brute, or a canny bluffer. The fewer the stage directions, the richer the possibility of each retelling.

  “Oh, thank you for coming,” said my mother when I walked into the yellow kitchen, too late. She hugged me. She was grateful, as if I owed her nothing at all but was doing her some kindness, and I held her a long time, my carry-on bag trying to wedge its way between us. Dana stood to the side, sympathy personified.

  Dana had moved back to Minneapolis six months earlier and been hired as the drama teacher at our old private school. Not long after, she was winning big roles in local theaters, doing much better than she ever had in New York. She had an apartment of her own but had been living with Mom since Sil was hospitalized for the last time. “I love it here,” she said when Mom had gone for a nap and we were having coffee in the kitchen, shrunken since our childhood. “I honestly feel”—she lowered her voice to a stage whisper—“that I’ve never been happier. Obviously, sad about Sil. I am. And I am, I am worried about what happens to Mom next, but I wish so much that you and Jana and the boys would come spend a month here. Everything’s different. I could almost say I’ve lived in a dream until now.” Dana took my hands. “It’s like I’ve never been happy before, like I didn’t know what the word really even meant. Everything else was just … preparing me. I have to tell you about someone I’ve been seeing. She’s moved in, actually.”

  22

  IT IS TIME TO CALL in the memoirist’s best friend: the changed name. I name my family, my poor sister, my German girl, my wronged wife. I call the villain of this story by my own or my father’s name. Yet one identity must be shrouded. What crime could justify this protection? Or, more likely, has the memoir come unmoored from memory’s safe harbor and now drifts off into black fantasy, and the desperate writer must do the legal minimum, lest the whole freyed tissue unravel?

  No, she was real. She still is real, and if she was not as innocent as some, neither was she as guilty, not by a long distance, and I send her and her daughter all my worthless love and yet more concentrated apology.

  What disguise can I tailor that will hide her from you while still showing you what she was? The more one loves, the more each detail matters. To smudge a line, pixelate the birthmark, drag a censor’s squealing black pen across her eyes, transpose two digits of her Social Security number—I am destroying her, and making all this more difficult to explain, because I will claim this one small memoirist’s privilege: if you saw her in every detail, up to her name, which fit her so snugly, you’d have done just the same as I. If you judge me harshly, it is only because, in my discretion, I am describing her so poorly.

  No risk in confessing that she was ten years younger than Dana and I. Can I safely disclose that she w
as of another race? Of another religion? (One as irrelevant and inescapably identifying to her as Judaism had become to Dana and me.) Can I say she was a composer and musician, that she played the theremin, professionally, in films and in Minneapolis theaters? Or that Dana called her “my tigress of the Euphrates”? If true, how many people in Minneapolis now know at once whom I mean? If false, how odd are these colors, how far from comprehensible I’ve made her, and thus me and everything about to happen.

  “And thus me.” For all I thought otherwise when I began this project, I do want to be understood. I do want to be forgiven. I do want you to believe me and agree with me and approve of me. And if I cannot have your acceptance, then I’m tempted to say, “So be it, I’ll play the villain instead.” That’s what passes for psychological depth in Richard III, you know.

  May I self-mitigate, allow myself some standard excuses? How about … Dana’s ties to the girl were weak, as strained as my own to my life back in the wilds of Bohemia? No. I saw no arguments between them, heard no doubts disclosed during twin-to-twin heart-to-hearts. No, Dana was in love, every bit as much as I later became, but she was there first, had made and received promises, had sought so long for just this love and could rightly expect her married and beloved twin brother, her long-ago best friend, to act with a scruple of decency. I knew all this. It was difficult, but not impossible, to will it out of mind.