by Susan Sontag
“He’s furious with me.”
She brought him some barber-pole candy. He threw it away. She bought him presents. He broke them. She read to him. He told her to stop.
Bogdan didn’t answer.
“Yesterday he told me he loves Aniela more than he loves me.”
“He’d have to be angry that you went away. And since he’s a child he doesn’t have to hide his feelings.”
“But I can make it up to him. He’ll forget. Do you think he’ll forget? He can’t stay angry.”
“I think he won’t stay angry,” Bogdan said.
“I’ve promised that I’ll never leave him again.”
“Excellent promise,” said Bogdan.
* * *
YOU COULD HAVE COME, Henryk. As far as I’m concerned, dear friend, you had no excuse anymore, once I was in New York, which is much closer to our old Europe. Bogdan would have liked you to be here, since he could not be. (He is with me now, I am glad to say.) But … passons. And so at last I have had my New York debut. Naturally—let me plume myself—it was a success. I have proved to myself once and for all that with a strong enough will one can surmount any obstacle. The theatre is always full (on gala nights the best tickets are sold at auction), the newspapers are enchanted with me, the women love me. And yet—will you be surprised by this?—I am consumed with anger. Or is it sadness? For I am truly alone in this triumph of mine; I can’t deceive myself about that. Where were my friends? Where is the community of friends I believed in? Where is Poland? To be sure, all the Poles we met here last year were in the audience on opening night, but of real friends the only one present was Jakub, who, as you know, has been living in New York for six months now. And what has become of our splendid artist? He has found employment as an illustrator on a popular magazine, Frank Leslie’s Weekly, and spends his days at a desk in the magazine office alongside the other illustrators. He says he hopes still to do some painting “on the side.” What a pity. And Jakub has heard from a friend in Kraków that Wanda recently made another try at suicide. Why didn’t you tell me about this? Awful, awful, awful! I know weak people will always succeed in harming themselves if that’s what they really want to do. But even so—
Maryna had invoked the power of the will, as she often did with Henryk—there was a reproach in that, as well as a boast—but perhaps will was just another name for desire. She wanted this life, whatever it cost her: this loneliness, this euphoria. The quasi-amorous approval of innumerable, never to be known or barely known, others; her own painful, invigorating dissatisfactions. She would have been devastated had the reviews been anything other than paeans. If Maryna was to believe what she read about herself, hers was the opposite of declamatory acting. Her “simplicity,” her “subtlety,” her “delicate and refined art,” her “utter naturalness” seemed very original to New York. But she did not believe what she read, especially when it consisted of nothing but praise, and for quite antithetical virtues. Certainly there was nothing natural about this naturalness, which was concocted for each role out of a thousand tiny judgments and decisions. Much, she knew, could be improved. Her voice still had its mighty throw, she allowed, but the yearlong absence from the stage had weakened the precision of her breath control. She felt the words sometimes lacked bite. She needed to vary still more the flow of certain passages. But when all this was corrected, as it would be by performing eight times a week (and on Sunday, Maryna came to the theatre for a few hours to work on the empty stage), would she not risk being too broad in her vocal effects?
Her fear was that these resurgent feelings of piratical masterfulness would provoke her to overacting. It is one thing to be uninterruptedly expressive, what acting is; another for the actor, out of vulgarity or defective self-awareness, to do too much. She said to Bogdan, “I would give ten years of my life to sit just once in the audience and see myself act, that I might learn what to avoid.”
Authority on the stage is tantamount to the ability to project continuously, fluently, piercingly, a character’s essence. In nature there are many off-duty moments, many unessential gestures; in the theatre characters reveal their essence all the time. (Anything else would be trivial, unfocused; oozing instead of signaling and shaping.) To act a role is to show what is emphatic in a person, what is sustained. Essential gestures are gestures that are repeated. If I am evil, I am evil all the time. Look at my leers, my scowls. I bare my teeth (if I am a man). Thinking of the suffering I’m about to wreak on my gullible victims, I quiver, visibly. Or, I am good (as women are good). Look, I am smiling, I am gazing tenderly, I bend forward to succor, or backward in pitiable recoil from the bestial advances of him-against-whom-I-am-powerless-to-defend-myself.
Everyone agreed that this was how to proceed. The audience can’t be mistaken about whom to love, whom to pity, whom to despise. But must showing one’s essence mean exaggerating the signs by which we recognize it? If one could have the courage to be not quite so pointed from the beginning, wouldn’t that be finer, truer? More fascinating? Every night as she went on stage Maryna promised herself, I will hold something back. I will not be entirely legible. More variance, she bid herself, even at the risk of being confusing. More smolder.
And my essence? thought Maryna. What would I show if I were playing myself?
But an actor doesn’t need to have an essence. Perhaps it would be a hindrance for an actor to have an essence. An actor needs only a mask.
Trying to analyze something ineffable which she brought to her roles, the critics fell back on words like “subtle” and “aristocratic.” The presentation of the self that had charmed in San Francisco fell short in New York. Maryna had entranced many a reporter in California with her tales of rude beginnings, when touring in the Polish countryside meant playing in riding schools and barns as often as in theatres. Here in New York they were more interested in her ideas about the theatre, as long as these were uplifting. But what hope was there of correcting any of the impudent misunderstandings that dog the transfer of a great career to another country? Every actor (singer, instrumentalist, dancer) has been taught, has mentors, an artistic genealogy, a moral genealogy too; but Maryna Załężowska’s, stocked with equally unpronounceable names, meant nothing here. Hers was an orphaned talent. And how to explain in America the distinctive sense of mission nourished by the Polish habits of devotion to impossible dreams. “We Poles are a very theatrical people,” she declared with summary intention to the new batch of journalists who interrogated her.
In Poland she had represented the aspirations of a nation. Here she could only represent art, or culture, which many feared as something frivolous or snobbish or morally unhinging. Bogdan pointed out with a smile that Americans seemed to need perennial reassurance that art was not just art but served a higher moral or wholesomely civic purpose.
For her early interviews with the New York press, she had at the ready an English translation, made by Ryszard, of a cherished tribute published in the Warsaw theatrical journal Antrakt. “In every role she plays, Załężowska is fully responsive to the age in which she lives, as the music of Verdi sighs, weeps, suffers, loves, and cries out in the idiom of all humanity. As Verdi is the supreme composer of the age, Załężowska is its greatest actress.” But Maryna suspected it would make no sense to anybody here that an eminent theatre critic in Poland had compared her, for the universality of her expressiveness—not for her role as bearer of her nation’s aspirations—to Verdi. Americans might think what was meant was that her genius was unsubtle, merely operatic.
Instead, Maryna declared: “Gentlemen, you don’t imagine me with a scrapbook, do you? I, who seldom read reviews and have never even thought of preserving what was written about me!”
She had won over the critics, including the redoubtable William Winter of the Tribune, the most powerful drama critic in the country. True, Winter could not resist mildly deploring Madame Zalenska’s choice of opening vehicle. “Was it really necessary for this exquisite artist (and a countess, too, min
d you!) to begin the conquest of our hearts by playing that dubious creature of frail lungs and even frailer virtue?” Of course Winter went on to forgive her. There had been not even a whisper of such censure in dear old San Francisco or blustery Virginia City, and Warnock had to explain to Maryna that the West was more broadminded (lax, some said), while eastern America (“Remember we’re a whole continent and there are fifty million of us!”), especially the middle of the country, could get a “a bit” stirred up about the virtue of women depicted on the stage, meaning that Maryna should steel herself for “a fair amount” of sermonizing about the threat to public morals posed by Dumas’s notorious and notoriously successful play.
Happily, not all the critics worried about whether their new idol had debased her art by playing a fallen woman. The influential Jeannette Gilder, of the Herald, who had become Maryna’s special fan, was more interested in the courtesan’s finery, an interest, observed Bogdan, one couldn’t have inferred from Miss Gilder’s own sartorial affectations, which included a high collar and cravat, a melon hat and man’s coat. “The arms, which are bared by her gown, are encased in twelve-buttoned cream-colored kids below the elbow, and banded between that point and the shoulder with a velvet ribbon fastened with a jeweled pin,” Miss Gilder noted in her description of Marguerite Gautier’s stunning first-act entrance. And wasn’t it amusing, continued Bogdan, that the clothes Maryna wore in Camille were of all her costumes the most copied by the censorious and the fashionable?
It was Bogdan who first pointed out to her (she would be the last person to see it, Maryna said) that ladies in New York were beginning to imitate her manners and gestures and hair styles (as in Act One of Camille, where her hair was dressed high on the head with puffs and bands), and Zalenska hats had made their appearance in the smartest shops, and Zalenska gloves, and Zalenska brooches, and “Polish Water,” a new eau de cologne—the label showed an oval portrait of Maryna superimposed on a drawing-room scene with a young man at a piano who had Chopin’s signature long hair and sensitive, consumptive face. Photographs of her in full Camille regalia were displayed in druggists’ windows and for sale in cigar shops. The newspapers carried the daily news of Madame Zalenska’s social engagements. Maryna still hadn’t put back the weight she had lost, and if she were too wraithlike she would not look well in the much admired gown she wore in the first act of Camille, a composite evening crinoline of teal-blue silk with a green-black velvet train, cut to fit close to the body. But she was haunted by the photographs of the new reigning star in Paris, Sarah Bernhardt, she of the birdlike face and scrawny silhouette. Girding herself for future rivalry, Maryna vowed to remain underweight.
After the four weeks at the Fifth Avenue Theatre and a further week of work (taking in, letting out) on her stage wardrobe, which now filled two dozen trunks tended by a German seamstress, Maryna embarked on the conquest of America, appearing with stock companies all over the country except the Far West. In Philadelphia, the city’s principal reviewer admired “the cross and tiara of diamonds worth forty thousand dollars” (as bruited by Warnock)—paste, of course—which she wore in Act Four of Camille. The mistake, Warnock’s mistake, Maryna decided, had been to do only Camille for her week at the renowned Arch Street Theatre. Maryna was disappointed in Philadelphia. Baltimore and Washington, where she also offered As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet, were more appropriately beguiled. Then back up the coast by steamer to where, Warnock had told her, she would be playing—her Rosalind and Juliet only—to the most cultivated audience in the country, in one of its most venerable theatres. (“The Boston Museum, Mr. Warnock? Is that common in America, for a theatre to be called a museum?” “Just in Boston, dear lady.”) Her new friend William Winter, a militant New Yorker, was more skeptical about the vaunted capital of high-minded America. Even Boston, he reassured Maryna teasingly, could not challenge her with audiences such as filled the theatres of London in David Garrick’s day, who knew their Shakespeare so well that an actor who garbled the text, mispronounced a word, or even misplaced an emphasis risked being hissed or noisily corrected by the pit and gallery. But, yes, he conceded, Boston was full of discriminating Shakespeareans. Maryna looked forward to the challenge with confidence. Since, lulled by praise (her vigilance notwithstanding), she was spending less time monitoring her English, the shock was all the greater the day after she opened at the Boston Museum in what she thought had been her most fluent Rosalind yet, when she read in the Evening Transcript that its eminent drama critic found her accent enchanting, especially in the romantic passages of As You Like It, but an impediment when it came to the demands of Shakespeare’s badinage.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” she wailed at Miss Collingridge, whom she had instantly summoned to her suite at the Langham Hotel for a coaching session. “How long have I been slipping?”
“In Philadelphia you said ozer for other, and in Washington you said loaf for love and strent for strength, and in Baltimore you said bret for breath and trone for throne and lar-r-r-k for lark.
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.
That was the worst.”
“Dear Mildred, how do you put up with me?”
“Armong, I loaf you.”
“Stop it, Mildred. I have taken the point.”
If only Maryna’s sole frustration were keeping her English fine-tuned enough to do justice to Shakespeare!
Toronto went better; Buffalo and Pittsburgh acknowledged themselves enchanted by this new, exotic ornament of the American stage; Cleveland and Columbus positively gleamed with approval. Since Maryna had made the mistake of telling Warnock that she never took more than two days to memorize a new role, it was just three days before they arrived in Cincinnati that he informed her that she was not only billed for Adrienne and As You Like It but, on the Saturday matinee, for East Lynne, too. Furious, Maryna reminded him that she’d said she would never stoop to Beast Lynne, as she called it—“I am an artist, Mr. Warnock,” she thundered, “not a merchant of tears!”—but there she was, in the second month of touring, having succumbed to Warnock’s pleas, Warnock’s insistence, playing it in Cincinnati and Louisville and Savannah and Augusta and Memphis and St. Louis. Warnock had been right of course when he assured her, “It’s money in the bank”—“It’s what?”—“I mean, audiences love it.” “Because they want to cry?” “Well, yes, people do like to cry in the theatre, almost as much as they like to laugh, and what’s wrong with that, dear lady? But what they most like is watching great acting. And that’s you!”
No exercise of histrionic prowess was more pleasing to audiences than that afforded by a plot requiring the main character to depart and then sneak back into the story, disguised for expediency or transformed by suffering, as somebody else, whose true identity, obvious enough to all who had paid to see the play, goes undetected by everyone on the stage. Such is the starring role in East Lynne—in effect, two roles. One is the weak-minded, gullible Lady Isabel, who deserts a loving husband and their children under the malign influence of a scheming rake. The other is the repentant sinner, prematurely aged by the agonies of contrition, who reenters her household as a bespectacled grey-haired governess, “Madame Vine,” to care for her own children. Her cry, after the littlest of the three, a mere babe at the time she had left, dies in her arms—Oh, Willie, my child, dead, dead, dead! And he never knew me, never called me mother!—unleashed in audiences an explosion of grief. And the tears gushed again when she, dying, throws off her incognito and begs her husband’s forgiveness—Let what I am be erased from your memory, think of me (if you can) as the innocent trusting girl whom you made your wife—is forgiven, and implores him not to punish their two remaining children for her own dereliction—Be kind and loving to Lucy and little Archie, she whispers hoarsely. Do not let their mother’s sin be visited on them!
Never, never! cried the actor who played Archibald in this particular stock company—America had dozens of Archibalds,
but there would be only one Isabel, the best, the most awesomely sad, as Maryna learned to play her. He bowed his head. She saw dandruff on his collar. She was spinning in a drum of unslakable grief. What am I doing, Maryna wondered as, little by little, she gave herself to the indestructible excitements and brazen pathos of East Lynne.
She was looking for a terrible tranquillity.
In Chicago, where she played at Hooley’s Opera House for ten days, she was importuned with flowers and gifts and entreaties from the city’s ever multiplying Polish settlement, the most numerous in America. On Sunday, following High Mass at St. Stanislaw’s with Bogdan and an interminable luncheon given by Monsignor Klimowski, Maryna offered a program in the social hall adjoining the church (the proceeds to be distributed among needy parishioners) in which she recited poems of Mickiewicz, passages from Słowacki’s Mazepa, and some of her famous moments from Shakespeare: Portia’s mercy speech, Ophelia’s mad scene, the Scottish lady’s somnambulistic rave. It made her feel very carefree to be delivering Shakespeare wadded in Polish. Gruff shabby men and red-eyed women in kerchiefs came forward and kissed her hands.
So much journeying, to do the same thing in each new place, shrinks the world. A new town amounted to the size and appointments of her dressing room, the greater or lesser incompetence of the stock-company actors, the security of seeing Bogdan at his post (in the wings, as he preferred, or in a box, as Maryna often insisted, where she could see him better while on stage), and the warmth of his reassurance that all had gone well.
As a young actress in Heinrich’s company, Maryna thought she had experienced the arduousness of touring to its fullest. But in America the need for respite was weakly acknowledged: Americans had invented the continuous tour, performance after performance, with only a day or two between one town and the next. Keeping to their compartment on the train, Maryna listened to the words of her roles in the clack of the wheels. Bogdan read. He would keep on reading when, after some desolate stop, they would be shunted to a siding to wait for an hour as more privileged trains hammered past them. Peter would gaze out the window, mumbling to himself, while Maryna stood and sat, sat and stood. She knew better than to interrupt him then, after having done it once.
