The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [107]
The shock when a con reveals itself is physically sickening, and I felt a shudder of pity for all those from whom my father had stolen over the years. He had escaped in the nick of time, dead and buried, praised by me despite years of better judgment.
Revelation, in my case, felt like a draining, like—to be a little unpleasant—a storm warning of intestinal panic, as if something were being flushed out of me, sluiced away from heart and brain, a voiding that was hotter, more acidic, more thorough and more scouring than the worst movement in my system’s muscular memory.
It ages you, this instantaneous purging of belief. Your skin hangs lower off the bones under the eyes, some fat and sinew are lost in the evacuation, and shadows start to fall across the face.
They don’t ever stop, those shadows. After they darken the half-moons under the eyes, they darken the room, the world, and then they set off to darken the past. All those warm moments at his end and at our start: the nervous request for help, the emails, the Tab, the apartment, and back, back, further and further back, shadows blackening all the way back. The death of Arthur meant the death of Arthur’s love all the way back, the nights on his floor, the crop circle, the little people of Saturn as I dozed in his arms, all flushing out with the other filth, all withering as the light went out and the cold wind picked up.
Too much? Too melodramatic? (By my assent he fashioneth complotment!) Maybe. But such aesthetic quibbling does not apply at the moment of revelation.
The only payoff in exchange for this loss is the sudden and permanent clarity of vision, the X-ray eyesight, and the charitable evangelist’s belief that this clarity can be taught to others before they have to feel the pain themselves. Sometimes this is true: clarity can be suddenly contagious when a group labors together under a forgery’s illusions.
What makes something rapidly and obviously a forgery after it was, sometimes for decades, so obviously genuine? Go Google the van Meegeren Vermeers. A child could tell you that those Navajos and Down’s syndrome maids aren’t by the same man who painted Girl with a Pearl Earring. Read James Frey’s memoir now: an elderly Amish lady could find a hundred impossibilities. Sometimes better science opens our eyes, but often it feels more as if a spell has worn off. We blink and look around, rubbing the fairy dust from our eyes, wonder whether we might have dreamt it all. Once you know it isn’t Shakespeare, none of it sounds like Shakespeare. How could it? If I didn’t write this, it wouldn’t sound like something I wrote.
First things first: I was not going to allow the publication, obviously. I would end this farce. Equally obviously, you are reading this, and I have failed. All I can hope now is that the critics do the job for me. The wise ones will quote me right now and say, as they should, or if only out of fear of appearing like suckers, “It’s a parody, a pastiche, obviously false, an act of inexcusable chutzpah, temerity, pretension.” Or will we hear instead, out of their fear of appearing like philistines, that it’s “a remarkable find, a treasure, certain to keep scholars and playgoers and Bardologists busy for years to come, a ripping yarn, quite possibly from the genius who gave us Macbeth”?
One day, someone will find something within the play to match what I found without: the wrong something. Maybe not even that, maybe there will be no flash of anachronism, no smoking verb fifty years out of place. Instead, someone trustworthy, far from our family dramas, will feel, as Coleridge felt of Henry VI, Part One, “the impossibility of this speech having been written by Shakespeare,” and everyone will wake up, and no one will even need to prove it, and this book will creep quietly out of print, and the 2011 edition will join the 1904 edition of this curiouser and curiouser family heirloom.
“He did it to me