The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [105]
My father, Arthur Edward Harold Phillips, lay still in his bed. He had probably been dead for several hours, since before I’d left that morning, or even when I’d been on the phone giving my sister romantic advice.
37
“I WILL NOT TRY TO EXCUSE my father’s acts. His acts were his own. His mistakes, crimes, defeats: these were his own. As Shakespeare wrote, I would not have it any other wise, and that is surely how my father felt. But I will say this of his life: he believed that the world could be transformed completely, if only occasionally, if only for one person at a time, but that was something, and that was worth it. There are times when I consider some of his greatest creations, his most selfless creations, and I feel cowardly in comparison when I think of what he hoped to achieve in his work.
“A novelist tries to capture a person in a phrase (a walk-on character), or a paragraph (a minor character), or a page (a major character), or a whole book (for the protagonist), but how to describe an entire life of a real person? Not in snatches of action or frame-frozen descriptions, but over a whole life? My father eludes my abilities. I can write a paragraph about him for you, but it seems to miss everything, even though it’s all true:
“Arthur Edward Harold Phillips was a dandy and a great artist and a great mind who could quote poetry in three languages to charm you. A self-made character, he was an original. He lived for art and wonder. He loved a woman, and he lost her, gave her up in self-sacrifice. He loved his two children and wanted to give them, more than anything, a love of literature and art and the world’s limitless capability to delight, and he succeeded. But he was also a man whose best principles eroded far too early, who was made bitter by the world’s indifference to his creativity, who needed money more than he ever would have guessed, who discovered his greatest genius was in his ability to bring back to life the spirit of long-ago geniuses, but who then wasted himself in the least exalted, least wondrous escapades one could imagine, far less wonderful than if he had simply done what he always claimed to fear the most and become an office hack or an advertising illustrator, and come home every day at five o’clock to a loving wife and admiring children in the suburbs. This, too, is a sort of wonder-working, after all.
“As far as an accurate portrait of my father, I don’t know if that paragraph is him or not. This writerly method fictionalizes him, cuts off so much of him—so many contradictions, extenuations, annexes, chapters—that what remains is only a shadow of him, a shadow of his hopes, and a shadow of his griefs. It seems impossible to descend through all the layers of him at even a single moment or at a single decision. I consider even one of his pedestrian crimes, and I ask myself, What motivated him? His worst moments can be explained by: his wonder-lust philosophy, bitterness, pride in his craftsmanship, mere habit, inevitability, simple greed and thoughtlessness, genetic selfishness bordering on criminality, love. I can hardly pull the burrs away to find the man underneath …”
I include this extract of egocentric eulogy (I went on for quite a while, in love with the sound of my words—frame-frozen!) because of certain contractual requirements I am coming to, and because it is the best testimony I have to illustrate precisely my state of mind before the events of the next week.
“And yet, for all of that, there is my father reading to me and my sister, the voices and the lessons, the laughter and the wisdom, so that his twins couldn’t wait to spend a weekend with him in his world of wonders. For all of that, there remains his generosity, his willingness to sacrifice for his children, to sacrifice for the only woman he ever loved, giving her an extraordinary gift because he knew he could not give her an ordinary one.”
I put my arm around my mother’s shoulder, and she patted