In America

by Susan Sontag

  “Please don’t say it,” said Maryna.

  “Say what?”

  “Mrs. Wenton, what plays would you like me to present? The Passion Play, perhaps.”

  “Is that another low French play? From its title I—”

  “No, no, it is a religious play, performed in Austria. Its subject is the sufferings of Christ.”

  “Listen to me, Madame Zalenska. You have a great presence, a great voice. Something speaks through you. It is a woman’s gift. Be a platform woman instead of a painted creature on a stage, pretending to be someone you are not. You could speak from your heart. You should be a preacher!”

  “And what becomes of my art?”

  “Art is a delusion! The greatest delusion in the world. Fame likewise.”

  “And money?”

  “Money is not a delusion but a snare.”

  “A delicate distinction,” said Maryna. “But then I cannot imagine an American thinking money a delusion pure and simple.”

  “Why are you criticizing this great country, which has been so kind to you?”

  “Ah,” cried Maryna, stubbing out her cigarette and rising, “you are right. It was a criticism, glib and unoriginal even—who has not denounced the American romance with money?—but one I have the right, the very American right, to level against my adopted country. For as you may know, my husband and I have this year—it is seven years since we arrived—become American citizens. I am very grateful to this country. And, believe me, I do not think money a delusion, either.”

  “Maryna, it’s time…” said Bogdan.

  “Yes. Yes. May I ask you, Mrs. Wenton, if you go often to the theatre?”

  “I am obliged to go”—she was looking up at Maryna with her head cocked—“to chart the progress of infamy.”

  “Then you will certainly want to see the play I am learning now and will present on Saturday in Louisville, at Macauley’s. It has a scene where a young husband is terribly excited by his wife, who dances a fiery tarantella shaking her tambourine in front of him.”

  Mrs. Wenton rose hastily.

  “Perhaps you would like me to dance it for you now.”

  “You persist in your hellish ways.”

  “I persist.”

  “My son will be very disappointed. ‘Mother,’ he will say, ‘you failed to save Madame Zalenska.’ I hope he will not be angry with me.” She had turned to go, then turned back. “Remember, the gates of hell are open.”

  “‘Would that Mr. Lincoln had fallen elsewhere than at the very gates of hell!’” Maryna intoned. “I’ve been told that after he met his tragic end at Ford’s Theatre, playhouses everywhere were closed for weeks, while Northern clergymen from their Sunday pulpits unleashed the judgment of God against my devilish profession.”

  “Being Kentucky born and bred, I shed no tears over the passing of that atheist Mr. Lincoln. Still, a playhouse is a poor place to die in.”

  “I should not mind dying in a theatre,” said Maryna. “Actually, I think I shall mind dying anywhere else.”

  “I shall pray for you, you poor misguided soul.”

  “Ah, Mrs. Wenton, what is one to do with people like you? You and your kind will ruin the chances of the theatre becoming anything other than shallow entertainment in this country. You will—you will ruin America!”

  “In any case,” said Bogdan, hurling his magazine to the floor, “you have ruined our supper. Maryna, come! Come!”

  * * *

  DECEMBER 3. The play with the tarantella. Writhing with lust. Incursion of a religious fanatic. Pathetic threats, tirades. Hellfire. Damnation. M. argumentative, fascinated.

  December 4. Why, I suppose, M. is excited by this play. It’s Frou-Frou turned upside down. The spoiled child-wife has only been pretending to be childish and silly, because that’s the way her husband likes her to be. Turns out to be quite intelligent. Isn’t deserting her family to pursue an illicit relationship. The problem: she’s been made to realize that she’s married to an unworthy husband. It’s the husband who is at fault, who is not forgiven. No hint to the audience that her striking out on her own—to find out who she is!—may prove a disaster. The play condones her abandoning home, children. Three children, like East Lynne!

  December 5. If desire is forbidden, it will swell and gush. The moon is smaller than the cloud covering it. This last sojourn in California. Reclining. Murmur of the stream. Fidgety smiles and downy, coppery, consenting … Things dreamed of became so well defined. I saddened. As if I had lost them. Smudged desire. Began to dream of M. Can’t leave her. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever.

  December 6. East and west. Safety and recklessness. Home and danger. Love and lust. Bring Juan María east to join the company as a porter or a waiter? Is this what I want?

  December 7. Probably a mistake to do the try-out in Louisville of our already notorious, new play from the Old World. Wife can’t leave her husband and three children in Kentucky, I said to M. Kentucky will never permit. She’ll have to stay, and make the best of things. M.’s look. At the least, we should change the title. Americans being very literal-minded, the audience may think it’s a play for children. Next Saturday, the sidewalk outside Macauley’s lined with perambulators. And Maurice thinks giving the wife a Scandinavian name will help public understanding of the play. Suggests Thora. Thora and her husband, Torwald? A bit too Scandinavian, no?

  December 8. The problem is, of course, the end. Will American audiences accept the idea of a woman who leaves her husband and children not because she is wicked but because she is serious. Not likely. Wouldn’t it be better, I say to M., if the play ended with the wife being reconciled with her husband? He does seem repentant. She can give him one more chance. And if she insists on leaving, walking out into a freezing winter night seems most improbable. It must be almost midnight. Where would she go at that hour? To a hotel, if there is a hotel in that little village? Isn’t it all rather melodramatic? Couldn’t she wait until morning?

  December 9. I thought you liked happy endings, I say. I think this is a happy ending, M. says. You can’t see why she wants to leave? All too well, I say. Everyone dreams of bursting the chains of marriage and starting over. Yes, M. says, but I don’t now. And you, Bogdan? Do you want me to answer that? I reply. I thought we were discussing how to end this play. Husband, husband, M. says, we’re always talking about ourselves when we talk of anything else. Yes, answer. Then why can’t the ending be changed, I asked. I’m not leaving, I said.

  December 11. M. agrees, reluctantly. Nora—no, Thora!—will think of leaving. But won’t. Will forgive her husband. Should it go well here, we can restore the real ending when we bring it to New York.

  December 12. Thora opened last night. M. magnificent. Maurice quite decent as the obtuse husband. Audience deplorable. Reviewers irate, even with the happy ending. Just as I feared. Offense to Christian morals and the American family. And oh, the tarantella.

  * * *

  HENRIK IBSEN’S Thora, with Marina Zalenska in the title role, had its only performance in Louisville, Kentucky.

  While Maryna went on looking for another new play, Maurice Barrymore said he had decided to write one for her that could not fail, on the theme about which she’d often spoken so movingly in his presence: the martyrdom of Poland under the Russian oppressors. The title was Nadjezda, after one of the two roles he was creating for Maryna: a beautiful Polish woman whose husband has been imprisoned by the Russians for his part in the 1863 Uprising. Prince Zabouroff, the chief of police, convinces Nadjezda to yield to his lust in exchange for a promise to release her husband; instead, Zabouroff sends him to the firing squad, and returns the bullet-ridden corpse to Nadjezda, whereupon she consecrates their little daughter to revenge, swallows poison, falls on her husband’s body, and dies. And Maryna would also play the beautiful daughter, Nadine, when grown, who avenges her parents’ deaths. Zabouroff, ever dissolute, ever predatory, has invited Nadine to his office late one night; as he lunges at her, she manages to stab him with a kni
fe seized from a nearby table set for their intimate supper. The play ends with Nadine swallowing poison and dying in the arms of her lover (the role Barrymore wrote for himself) when she discovers he is the son of the man she has killed.

  Maryna couldn’t refuse to do the play: it was Maurice’s gift to her, and Maurice was a splendid actor. She was very very fond of Maurice. If only his fondness for her hadn’t inspired this maudlin caricature of Polish patriotism, Polish suffering, Polish chivalry. For instance, when, before fleeing, Nadine sets two candles by Zabouroff’s head and says a brief prayer … Maurice, really!

  “Maudlin? Oh. What I meant is that she repents of her violence, you see. I should say the pious gesture is touching, Madame Marina. Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t, Maurice. This is sentimentality, not piety. Nadine may be appalled by her own violence but she should not repent. The Czarist police chief deserves to die.”

  After a few performances in Baltimore, Maryna opened Nadjezda in February 1884 at the Star Theatre in New York and performed it more than fifty times in the spring and summer national tour.

  When Maryna did not continue with Nadjezda the following year, its duplicitous author sent it to Sarah Bernhardt, declaring how honored he would be if she would read his play; the two leading roles, he barely had the courage to avow, had been written with her in mind.

  And Bernhardt must have liked his play a little since obviously she had passed it on to Victorien Sardou, her regular dramatist and her lover: two years later she opened in Paris in a Sardou vehicle all too reminiscent of Nadjezda. To be sure, Sardou had made a few expert changes. A story stretching over twenty years had been compressed into an action taking place between late morning of one day and the following dawn. The failed Polish Uprising of 1863 had been turned into a failed Republican uprising in Rome at the end of the eighteenth century, the noble Polish wife into an impetuous Italian opera singer, and the husband awaiting execution into an ardent lover and a painter. Instead of a mother and a daughter, and two suicides, there was one heroine, the singer, who, after securing her lover’s freedom (she thinks) and killing the vicious police chief, mounts to the roof of a castle on the Tiber for the fake execution she had been promised, discovers she has witnessed a real execution, and leaps to her death.

  Maryna was unmoved by Maurice’s distress. True, she had dropped Nadjezda. But he shouldn’t have sent it to Bernhardt. He was justly punished.

  Though Sardou had apparently retained those absurd candles set on either side of the police chief’s corpse, it sounded to Maryna as if he’d much improved Maurice’s play. Indeed, now that its protagonists were no longer Polish patriots, Maryna began to covet it. Peabody wrote Sardou with proposed terms for Maryna to acquire the rights to his play in America. Before she could consider seriously being so beastly to Maurice, Sardou cabled a polite refusal. Might he have suspected that Maurice planned to bring a lawsuit against him for plagiarism? More likely, a veto had come from Bernhardt, who would never allow the most successful of all the roles written for her to pass into Marina Zalenska’s hands.

  Unaware of Maryna’s own projected treachery, and with his lawsuit foiled, the luckless author of Nadjezda suggested replagiarizing his own play and turning Sardou’s Tosca into a Civil War story. Lydia—no, Annabelle, the beautiful wife of a spy for the Union cause who has been sentenced to death by a military court in Georgia, pleads with a Confederate general to spare her husband’s life. Once her beau, the lecherous General Donnard offers a despicable bargain, which, moreover, he has no intention of keeping. In the conservatory of Donnard’s Greek Revival mansion, George, the genial butler, has lit the gleaming silver candelabra on the table set for a late-night supper of oysters and champagne, while George’s owner awaits the arrival of the lovely petitioner, who naïvely imagines—

  Out of the question, Maurice! Out of the question. It was Bogdan who vetoed that idea, and Maryna went back to her already secured triumphs.

  * * *

  “LISTEN, BOGDAN. ‘The greatest actress on the American stage is a Pole. Indeed, Madame Zalenska has no living rival but Sarah Bernhardt, whom’—listen!—’whom to my mind she for the most part surpasses.’”

  “Who wrote that? Not William Winter…?”

  “Hardly.” She laughed, as she descended into Winter’s raspy voice. “‘Americans must stand together in their stern determination to prevent an immoral use of the Theatre, made with the pretence of a serious purpose. I am speaking of the fashion of presenting nasty “problem plays.”’ How he hated our little Ibsen venture, remember?”

  “The ever worshipful Jeannette Gilder?”

  “Not even! A critic in Theatre whom I’ve never met.”

  “So it’s done, Maryna. You’ve won.”

  “What’s left is for me to believe what I read.”

  Next year she would be doing a national tour with Edwin Booth: Ophelia to his Hamlet, Desdemona to his Othello, Portia to his Shylock, and in Richelieu, a Bulwer-Lytton drama in which Booth had enjoyed a success second only to his Hamlet, she would be playing Julie de Mortemar, the Cardinal’s defenseless ward. Another woman victim!

  “Poor Maryna,” said Bogdan. “Such a strain life has placed on her credulity. Obsequious critics, who may not dare do other than praise her. Devious husband, who may not dare tell her the truth, but who has nevertheless tried to impart, if not tell … what seems too crude to tell.”

  “If you want to leave,” Maryna said, “you should. I’m strong enough now.”

  “Pack a bag, pull off my wedding band and thrust it at you, open the door, slam the door, walk into the snowy night?”

  “This isn’t the only life you could lead.”

  “That could be said of many people,” said Bogdan.

  “But, Bogdan, right now I’m saying it of you.”

  “You think I’m a coward.”

  “No, I think you love me. Husbandly love. Friendship. But, as we both know, there are other kinds of love.” She reached out one hand as she finished tying back her hair. He passed her the box of grease sticks. “I hope you believe that I always wish you would find what you need.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Won’t?”

  “I’m too formed. Of a piece. Finished. My America is you. Still you. When I’m … there, I— You can’t imagine how much I miss you.”

  “And you can’t imagine, dearest Bogdan, because I haven’t understood it myself, how much I love you. Would you like me to try to give up the stage again?”

  “Maryna!”

  “I would do it for you.”

  “Darling, Maryna, I forbid you even to consider making such a sacrifice for me.”

  “I don’t know that it would be such a sacrifice.” She was massaging a fine layer of cocoa butter into her forehead and cheeks. “As you say, I have—but I don’t like this word—won. It only remains to go on, repeating myself, trying not to go coarse or stale. What kind of monster will I have become when I’ve made twenty national tours? Thirty? Forty?” She laughed girlishly. “When even I will be resigned to playing Juliet’s Nurse? No, I could never resign myself to the Nurse! I’d rather play one of the witches in Macbeth.”

  “Maryna!”

  “I adore shocking you, Bogdan,” she said in her throatiest tones. “Macbeth. I’ll say it again. Macbeth. Do you think we shall be struck by lightning?”

  “You can always charm me, Maryna. You charm me quite out of my mind. I did go up in the aero with Juan María and José. I’ve continued to fly with them.”

  “I thought so. How brave you are.” She stood, and reached out to hold his face.

  “How kind you are,” he said. “I thought I would vanish into myself. Maybe I hoped it would hurtle and crash.”

  “But it didn’t, dearest Bogdan.” She tasted his mouth. He enfolded her in his arms. “And, you see, no bolt of lightning. Though it would have been lovely to die together just now. Crash. Fire. Ashes.”

  “Maryna!”

  “And now,
since you’ve succeeded in making me cry, you must vacate my little kingdom. How can I put on my makeup while I’m standing in a drizzle of reconciliations? Go, my love. Go!” Her smile was radiant. “And be sure”—her mouth parted and her eyes went ceilingward as memory bit—“be sure to set the lock so I don’t have any unwelcome intruders.”

  Maryna sat down and looked into the mirror. Surely she was weeping because she was so happy—unless a happy life is impossible, and the highest a human being can attain is a heroic life. Happiness comes in many forms, to have lived for art is a privilege, a blessing, and women are talented at renouncing sexual felicity. She heard the closing creak of the dressing-room door. She listened for the click as it latched.

  Nine

  “YOU SEE, my dear Marina … I trust we may dispense with Madame Marina and Mr. Booth now that we’re alone, and I am exhausted and sated with applause and quite as drunk as I need to be … I must tell you that I didn’t approve when you came downstage and touched me tonight. Keep your eyes fixed on me throughout, ignoring the others in the courtroom, no objection to that. We both agree the speech is addressed to Shylock. The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. No, it doesn’t, but that’s not the point here, which is, my point, my point is … Portia is trying to convince Shylock, and thereby to move him. He’s not easily moved. He has too many grievances. Portia may be moved herself by the wretched fellow. But Portia should never touch Shylock. Even if she only touches his shoulder. Touch his shoulder, touch any other part of him. No touching! Shylock is in pain. [Stares into the glass he is holding.] And being in pain is very … combustible. [Looks up.] I suppose you thought to show that Portia is very feminine under her red lawyer’s robes, very feminine, and therefore knows, without needing to be told, that the ogre has senses, affections, passions, hurts. But that is a foolish sentimental gesture. [Shakes his head.] You are monstrously sentimental, woman, has anyone ever told you that? I myself prefer large, wrathful gestures. Which does not mean I shall not touch you before the evening is over, if I have a bit more to drink. Don’t tell me that you’re married, or that you’re no longer young, or something of that kind. You are thirteen years younger than I am, unless you lie about your age, as does every attractive woman who can get away with it, but let’s leave that, the touching and the rest, for later, as the whim strikes us. [Stands by the fireplace.] For now I shall only insist that you drink with me. No ladyish resistance? Excellent sign. Excellent. But nodding and smiling, your infallibly seductive smile, and touching the top of your lovely hair, aren’t enough. I want to hear a robust ‘Yes, Edwin. Yes … Edwin.’ Brava! Well done. [Finishes his glass.] And a ‘well done’ to you, Ned! [Sets the empty glass on the mantel.] Ned is what I was called as a child. But you can’t call me Ned. Not when you’ve just started to call me Edwin. Ned would be too intimate, don’t you think? And we do best, you and I, on modest rations of intimacy. We’re actors. [Places his right foot on the fender.] Do you ever wish you were a child again, Marina? Ah, you don’t either. Something we have in common. Although I suspect we haven’t much in common, you and I, besides being actors. Granted, that is a great deal. Is it not, Marina? Do I have your complete attention, Marina? I see your gaze wandering, in embarrassment, let’s say, to the bust of Shakespeare on top of the bookcase. Stare away. You’ll find a picture or a bust of Shakespeare in every room here. Shall I get it down for you? [Walks to the bookcase.] No? You see, you’d much rather stare at me. [Pats Shakespeare on the head.] Acting, Marina, is what you and I do. We played together before an audience this evening. Tolerably well, I might add. And, sans audience, we shall go on acting with each other, yes? But of course we shall be perfectly, perfectly sincere. [Makes a stage bow.] Whom shall I play? I think, let me see, I think I shall impersonate Edwin Booth. What an outstanding idea. He seems a much more interesting fellow than Shylock, and every bit as unhappy. Famously unhappy, brooding, wonderfully equipped to play tragic parts. However, don’t think me too tyrannical, I’d prefer … tonight … that you not play Marina Zalenska. [Fetches a bottle of whiskey from a cabinet.] Could you consider it? Just to humor me. Surely you have a few other selves in your repertory. I do think it very entertaining that for the last ten years everyone has agreed that the greatest actress in the English-speaking world is a Pole. A Pole with an accent. Yes, Marina. No one mentions your accent anymore, it is part of your magic, but eet ees ver-ree, verr-rree noticeable. Ah, for God’s sake, don’t pout, woman. I shall not deny that, accent and all, you phrase better than most who own the language. Another glass? Good. I’m curious to see when it will have an effect on you. [Circles her.] You are enchanting, Marina Zalenska. Either I’m being quite sincere or I just want to flatter you. Which do you think? Or neither. Perhaps I am a parrot. [Squawks like a parrot.] Don’t be alarmed. My father sometimes did that. In the wings. Simpering and screeching and squawking. Just before he went on, and became instantly noble, eloquent, melodious. What was I saying? Oh, yes, they were saying. ‘The most enchanting person I ever met.’ Doesn’t that ever trouble you, Marina? Do you never ask yourself, what in God’s name must I have done to myself that people should find me so enchanting? [Kisses her hand.] You probably know that I had no success playing Romeo and soon dropped it from my repertory. As for Benedick … I was never a good Benedick! I could never be light enough. There is something earthbound in me. I shall never fly out of it. Ah, well. We must do what we do best. Don’t you agree? I like playing villains best. Pity we’re not doing Richard III on the tour. [Twists his body, becomes misshapen.] That was Father’s first great role. And you’ve been Lady Anne—though not yet with me, alas—who cannot resist Dick Crookback when he plays the lover. [Straightens up.] Tell me, are you that much younger than I? Don’t blush, woman! Do you think we’re on a stage here? Well? Your secret shall be safe with me. I see you hesitating. I see you want to please me. I thought so. Well, you are still my junior by seven years. And quite good-looking. Capital for a woman. Am I being too sardonic? Are you in need of some balm? All actors need to be flattered. Who would know this better than Edwin Booth? Let’s see, what can I say to please you that would also be true? Ah, yes. [Points his finger at her.] You walk well. I liked your walk tonight. You don’t forget the play is set in Venice. Portia walks as if she is treading on marble. I shall remember that. That means, I shall steal it. From now on, Shylock too shall walk on marble. [Walks across the room. Walk becomes mincing. Stops. Laughs.] You see, I am still working on the role after all these years. My father would, when he had a run of Shylocks to do, go about muttering in Hebrew. Or something that sounded like Hebrew. Once while doing Shylock in Atlanta, he went into that city’s finest restaurant and ordered ham and greens, and when the waiter brought it to his table, dashed the plate to the floor, shrieking ‘Unclean! Faugh! Unclean! Faugh!’ and stormed out. I of course, who am the very soul of rationality, don’t for a minute think as Shylock when I am not on stage in the Jew’s dark-brown gaberdine and tawny-yellow slouch hat, holding the knotted walking staff in my beringed right hand. [Stretches out his hand to her.] Nor do I think as Othello, except when I have made myself sooty as the Moor. Or even as Richard III, much as I relish the role. Ditto for Richelieu. Hamlet … perhaps. You could say I have a weakness for Hamlet. Not because everyone thinks I am Hamlet-like. I, Hamlet-like? As my father would say, faugh! Still, Hamlet reminds me of something in myself. Maybe it’s that Hamlet is an actor. Yes, Marina, that’s all he is. He is acting. He seems to be one thing, and underneath that seeming, what is there? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. The inky-black suit he wears at court in the second scene. That tenacious, showy mourning for his father. Everyone’s father dies, as Gertrude reminds him, and right she is, Why seems it so particular with thee? And Hamlet howls, he is howling, you know, Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’ But he does know ‘seems.’ He knows nothing else. That’s his problem. Hamlet would give anything, anything, not to be an actor, but he is condemned to it. Condemned to
being an actor! He is waiting to break through seeming and performing, and just be, but there is nothing on the other side of seeming, Marina. Except death. Except Death. [Looks around the room.] I am looking for my Yorick-skull. Could I have misplaced it? Yorick! I mean, Philo! Where are you? What did I do with that skull? [Pulls open the rolltop desk. Tosses papers on the floor.] A prop, a prop. My kingdom for a prop! My last line would have gone so much more resoundingly if I could have brandished a skull. Except death. Except Death. Did you hear the capital D on the second ‘death’? Of such wee details are great performances made. But I’m sure you did hear it, Marina. What better audience than you could a crushed tragedian have? [Stretches out his hand to her.] My little princess. My Polish queen. You have kindly consented to keep Ned company as he sinks into his cups. You know he is quite harmless, since he is so drunk, so your virtue is safe. Even if you are a respectable married woman, not so young, and so forth. But beware of old Ned. He’s a sly one. [Does a pirouette.] He may only be pretending to be drunk. Perhaps he is really just deranged. And therefore just a leetle leetle dangerous. Like Hamlet, he’s a sly one too. He pretends not to be acting. And he gives acting lessons to others. Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. Don’t you think his instructions to the actors are rather obvious? Very. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action. Why, he’s as banal as Polonius! Where’s the fire? Where’s the recklessness? Perhaps I should play Hamlet on tiptoe, the whole play from start to finish, as my father once did Lear in Buffalo. Or in a whisper, as he once did Iago in Philadelphia. Of course my father was mad. Or drunk. Or both. One couldn’t easily tell which. Like me, is that what you’re thinking, Marina? It isn’t? Oh. I thought you were going to be sincere with your old friend Ned. [Sits beside her on the divan.] But is Hamlet mad? Much ink spilled over that. I should say that Hamlet must be considered mad because only a mad person would think of disguising himself as a mad person, when there are so many other disguises to choose from. But perhaps not. Perhaps there aren’t many disguises to choose from. Suppose being mad is the only one available, what do you think, Marina, in which case Hamlet’s choice makes perfect sense. A most excellent, rational, charming … Prince of Denmark, I always say. A tad unhappy, to be sure. Very unhappy, indeed. But if to be unhappy were to be mad, why then we would all be mad. [Takes off his shoes and rubs his feet.] Am I boring you? I hope not, because now I’m coming to your role. [Jumps up.] But Ophelia goes mad, so it’s not interesting. Raving about flowers. Hamlet wasn’t nice to her. Poor girl. Hamlet stuck his blade into her father’s gut. Well, his mother was getting on his nerves. And he thought there was a rat behind the curtain. [Picks up the poker from the fireplace, brandishes it like a sword.] And off she went into the water. Do you understand about madness, Marina? I don’t think so. I’d lay odds that you are very expert at fending off your griefs. Not altogether of course. Am I right? A leetle leetle bit of suffering. Ah, you Europeans. You invented tragedy so you think you have a monopoly on it. And we Americans, we’re all callow optimists. Right. I can feel an access of callow optimism coming on right now. How refreshing! Ahhhhhh … Another whiskey, Marina? You know, the only time I’ve seen you make Ophelia really seem mad was last week in Providence when, unusually for you, distracted, could it have been by me, gnashing my teeth alongside you in the wings, you made your entrance in Act Four empty-handed and, entirely unflustered, proceeded to distribute your posy to Gertrude and Claudius and Laertes. Invisible flowers. Father would have appreciated that. [Pours himself a drink.] Did I say my father squawked like a parrot? I remember a Hamlet in Natchez, when, during Ophelia’s mad scene, a voice off stage began to crow like a rooster, and sure enough, it was Father, perched on top of a high ladder in the wings. [Crows.] Like that. So, dear Ophelia, do look about you when going mad. It can be contagious. My mother worried so about Father when he was on the road, and at fourteen sent me out with him to be his dresser and companion. Not to learn acting, anything but that! Johnny was to be the actor, the heir. Father said I ought to be a cabinetmaker, so it was a great sign when he invited me to eat Shakespeare with him one night in Waterbury. Bitter, I thought. Delicious, he said. Some pages from Lear. While Hamlet, we were talking about Hamlet, was a prince, who expected, rightly expected, to be the heir. [Returns to the fireplace.] Don’t you think Hamlet’s father is the mad one? It seems to me quite mad to turn yourself into a ghost and come back to haunt your son. But at least Hamlet didn’t have a brother who could come back and haunt him. You know, after Johnny fired the shot he leaped from the presidential box onto the stage and shouted his line. Sic semper, you know. And broke his leg. [Limps over to the desk.] I am about to have another drink, Marina. Yes? One sign of an approaching paroxysm of my father’s appetite for liquor was his use of a peculiar gesture, like this [saws the air with his right hand beside his head], and if I would try to stop him from drinking, which was part of my job, he would make that ominous gesture and shout, ‘Go away, young man, go away! By God, sir, I’ll put you aboard a man-o’-war, sir.’ Sheer nonsense, as you see. Nothing could be done to stop him. Only undress him after and clean up his vomit. [Lifts his glass.] To you, old mole. He was a great actor. You must take my word for it, Marina. Truly great. He had astounded London as Richard III when he was twenty-one, and was hailed as the rival and successor to Kean. And he made his New York debut a few years later in the same role. My father as the hunchbacked villain was part of my life from early childhood on. He would enter the stage from the left amidst a tempest of boisterous hand-clapping. The first thing one saw was his lifted foot passing the wing, then the rest of him followed, head bent. He slowly walked down the stage to the footlights, musingly kicking his sword which he held by its sash away from his body. Forty years have passed and I can hear the clank of the sword and feel the eerie hush of three thousand people waiting for him to open his mouth. Now is the winter of our discontent— I suppose Father’s style of acting was inflated and stagey. Certainly it would be considered so by today’s standards. Nobody called him introspective and intellectual, as they do me. [Laughs.] He obeyed his terrors. He recognized the devil in himself. Father had sworn never to eat meat, ‘dead flesh’ he called it, and once when he broke his rule, did penance by filling his shoes with dried peas, then fitting them with lead soles and trudging all the way from Baltimore to Washington. He thought he was bad. He knew, some of the time he knew, he was mad. ‘I can’t read! I’m a charity boy! I can’t read! Take me to the lunatic asylum!’ he once shouted in the middle of a Lear at the Wieting in Syracuse. He was hustled off stage, to the sound of more than a few catcalls. But such outbursts on stage were rare. Oh. What do I see? I am still in my stocking feet! [Puts his shoes back on.] I gabble on about my father because it hurts so to talk about my brother. When I talk about Johnny I weep. [Raises his hand imperiously.] Not yet. Wait. ‘To kill a king, that’s a great deed,’ Johnny would declaim. ‘You’ll see, soon the name of Booth will be known everywhere.’ I thought it was Johnny posturing. How can an actor be taken seriously? It’s all hocum, vanity, boasting. An actor is always trying to make himself interesting. First he has to make himself interesting to himself. Then to other people. Do you find yourself interesting, Marina? [Looks about for his glass.] Threats, augurs—and we hear only what we want to hear. Did Lincoln’s wife heed him when the Great Emancipator told her the dream he’d had, in which he was drifting alone down a dark river? No, they went to the theatre. [Laughs.] Johnny was already much admired. Who knows if he would not have been more successful than I, even than Father, if he had not—if he had lived. He was wonderful in romantic roles. Romeo, the lot. Not for him the villains, Richard III and Iago and the Scottish lord, or the great self-deceivers, like Hamlet and Othello. He received hundreds of letters a week from lovesick women and girls, not to mention the missives from the women lucky enough to be granted his favors. [Begins to cry.] Johnny wanted to be loved. [Takes out an embroidered handkerchief.] If I weep now, will y
ou think these are actor’s tears? They are, you know. Hath not an actor eyes? If you prick him, doth he not bleed? I was playing at the Boston Theatre when it happened. It was thought, at first, to be a family conspiracy, and Junius, my older brother, was arrested, though soon let go. I wasn’t arrested but my movements were watched by the police. All the Booths received death threats. [Gazes at his hands.] On politics Johnny and I quarreled like demons, since I was for the Union, and abolition. I had voted twice for Lincoln. Johnny thought he had killed a tyrant. He expected to be acclaimed as a hero. His death was excruciating. And the Booths will always be his family. What is an actor compared with a regicide—no, the assassin of a saint? Why wasn’t I lynched? I was ready. When, many years later, someone actually did attempt to murder me—and then it wasn’t a hater of the theatre but a theatre lover, a stagestruck lunatic he was called in the papers—I was no longer ready. Histriomania, I think this kind of insanity is called. You know the story. No? [Sits again.] It happened in Chicago, at McVicker’s, during a King Richard II. One Mark Gray and his pistol were in the second balcony. I was on stage, in a dungeon in Pomfret Castle, well launched into the sad young king’s last soliloquy.